


The long way round to heaven

by Bearfacedcheek



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Can i get in on this spring fling?, Canon Divergence, F/M, Flat mates, Jeronica, New York, Post-Episode: s02e21 Chapter Thirty-Four: Judgment Night, Running away to New York, Slow Burn, out of body experience, post riot night
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2019-11-13 11:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18030656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bearfacedcheek/pseuds/Bearfacedcheek
Summary: “This could screw everything up. Jesus why couldn’t you just, fucking not?”“I did just fucking not Jughead,” she retorts hotly. “I’ve been not for months. No one was ever supposed to know, least of all you. So, don’t blame me for what you saw when you invaded a private moment.”“Oh, my bad Veronica,” sarcasm, his most comfortable armour, wraps itself around his words. “Did my near-death experience compromised your privacy? I’m sorry that my spirit took an astral fucking walk out of my almost corpse and y-”“Don’t,” she gasps. Her hand flies to her mouth and it trembles visibly as she draws it away. “Don’t say that. Jesus Jughead we almost lost you.”





	1. Astral revelations

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. 
> 
> I bring you Jeronica!! Because i got excited reading the spring fling stuff from the lovely Krewlak and bothromeoandjuliet and I back burnered my Bughead fic in favour of pushing on with this.
> 
> This one is set post judgement night after after Jughead gets beaten half to death and before Archie is arrested.

The pain doesn’t last as long as the fear. Something shuts down in his brain somewhere between the fifth broken rib and the hundredth kick in the face and the pain dulls into background noise. But the fear, the _oh shit I’m going to die_ fear, stays until he welcomes the fall into unconsciousness like an angel of mercy.

 

The next time he opens his eyes the scene is strangely hazy, like he’s looking through dusty glass. A hospital, he realises. He must have made it to the hospital. But the perspective is strange, he’s looking _at_ a hospital bed instead of up from one. Is he okay? Is he so okay he’s actually standing up? Maybe. He can’t feel any pain, so maybe things weren't as bad as he’d thought.

 

He drops his gaze to inspect his own body and with a detached sense of panic realises there’s nothing there. No hands where his hands should be, no torso wrapped in clean white bandages. No bruised and battered legs.

 

His gaze returns to the bed. To the back of a blonde head bent over a prone figure. Betty. On the other side his father sits with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Betty’s shoulder’s shake and he knows she’s sobbing silently. He knows the body in the bed is his. He knows he’s dead, or dying, or something. Not in his body anyway.

 

Is it comforting, to know he exists without it? That he’ll go on when it fades away? Not nearly as comforting as you’d imagine to be honest. He steps, or floats, or fuck knows what, he moves closer so he can see his own brutalised body.

 

The man in the bed doesn’t even look like him so disfigured is its face. But it’s him, he knows that, and the rhythmic beeping of the machines tells him that he’s not dead just yet. There’s a tube in his throat, a pump, a dozen pipes and wires. He’s not dead, but he’s sure as hell isn’t really alive either.

 

Just then Archie cautiously enters the room, shutting the door softly as if afraid it’s noise might disturb him. It’s ludicrous but its oddly caring too in a way that’s so very Archie Andrews and the place where his heart should beat swells with love for the redhead. His best friend’s face it blotchy and red from crying and his first thought, the first instinct of a lifetimes friendship, is to comfort his brother. To tell him he’s okay, he’s right here. It’s stupid he realises as he moves forward, he’s not here and he’s really, really, not okay.

 

Archie and Betty cling to each other and he can see her face now. The sorrowful tapestry of her red rimmed eyes and the pale ghostly pallor of her tear streaked cheeks. He sees her grief, but he sees her strength too. In the way she holds Archie, giving more comfort than she takes. Betty Cooper, what a woman.

 

He watches them as they huddle around his body. They don’t speak, they don’t hope, they just grieve.

 

Then suddenly there’s a whooshing sensation and he’s looking at his mother staring vacant eyed at his grandparents’ chintzy collection of porcelain figurines and hugging herself tightly. No tears he notices. Not really a surprise, but a kick in the gut all the same.

 

Another whoosh and it’s the Whyte Wyrm. Toni in Cheryl’s arms crying softly. Sweetpea raging, demanding vengeance, blood on his knuckles and on the wall. “If the boss dies I’ll burn them all I fucking swear it”

 

The boss? Jesus is that how Sweetpea saw him? The boss? He thought he hated him, or at least violently resented him. It’s a shame he won’t get a chance to enjoy that sense of respect.

 

Whoosh. Fred Andrews splashing water on his weathered face in a hospital bathroom, looking exhausted and hopeless.

 

Whoosh. Alice Cooper pacing anxiously, phone in hand.

 

Whoosh. Veronica in Archie’s bedroom looking down at the flannel shirt he left there a few days ago, stroking the fabric and watching the motion of her own fingers with dry unseeing eyes. No tears here either he thinks wryly.

 

He’s ready for the next whoosh - though this kaleidoscope of grief must be ending soon, he doesn’t after all have that many friends - when her fingers grasp the shirt and brings the fabric to her face, slumping to her floor, a grief broken marionette with cut strings.

 

She makes a noise like an animal in pain. An agonised wail that breaks like a splash of dirty water against the silence of the house. Her whole body convulses and tears come in deep racking sobs as she desperately pulls in choking gasps of air that barely seem enough to sustain her weeping let alone the chant of “No. no. no,” she starts up as she clings to his shirt and rocks back and forth on her knees.

 

He can’t understand this outpouring of grief, nor the fractured pleading prayers that follow, in and out of Spanish as her body doubles up on itself. “Santa María, Madre de Dios, God please, please don’t take him. Oh god, not Jughead please. Prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell'ora della nostra morte”

 

She’s clutching her stomach like she can physically hold herself together even while she falls apart in a mess of snot and tears that blur her perfect lines. River beds of silt-like mascara run sluggishly down her cheeks and dark cherry lipstick smears her teeth and jaw. She’s never looked more human or more flawed. How strange he thinks as he watches, fascinated, that she’s never looked more beautiful.

 

Her phone rings and her body stills. Several deep breaths later and she answers with an impressively steady voice. “Betty. What can I do? Whatever you need”

 

Less than twenty minutes later he follows her back into the hospital. She’s poised and perfect. Every hair in place and her make up flawless. He doesn’t know if he should be impressed or a little scared by her steel. He’s all but dead so maybe it doesn’t matter.

 

Except it does. Because no one this composed weeps like that for a best friend's boyfriend, or a boyfriend's best friend. Even if they’re friends, which is debatable sometimes, her grief is too big, too much raw blood and guts agony, for this to be simply the tears of a friend.

 

She holds Betty at his bedside, the blonde’s tears wetting the claret satin of her dress, and tells her that they’ll be okay. They’ll get through this, together, one day at a time. To remember that Jughead loved her, so much, and he wouldn’t want her to cry.

 

He doesn’t want either of them to cry.

 

“Ready man?”

 

He turns to see Fangs Fogarty leaning against the wall. “Fangs,” to his surprise as they collide he has arms to embrace his dead friend and he clings tightly to the smaller man’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you man”

 

“You too boss.” Fangs’ eyes sparkle with an untainted warmth he’s rarely seen in his lifetime. A serene and knowing contentment. “Come on, it’s time”

 

“Time?”

 

Fang’s smiles and answers softly, patiently, as if to a child. “To go. Can’t you hear it?”

 

The machines around his bed are letting off an ominous sustained beep and doctors are rushing in. Betty and Archie are pushed backwards out of the room, straining to see as his body jerks under the charge of the defibrillator. Veronica melts into the wall making herself invisible to the hurrying medics. Watching.

 

“I can’t” he tells Fangs, his eyes on the brunette's face. “I need to know.”

 

“Doesn’t matter man, it’s your time and it’s,” a look of wonder fills his dark eyes. “I can’t tell you how much better it is. Come on.”

 

“Heaven?” he asks incredulously. The literal heaven he never believed in for a second?

 

“Yeah dude, who’d have fucking thought it?”

 

He takes a step towards Fangs. He can feel it’s call. Peace, rest, happiness, he feels it pulling, lulling soothing, welcoming. Heaven, Christ he actually gets to go to heaven?

 

He glances back over his shoulder.

 

“They’ll be okay,” Fangs assures him with gentle certainty.

 

Veronica bites down hard enough on her trembling lip to turn the flesh white, keeping silent and unnoticed, staying with him. She’s so strong and yet she cried like her heart had been torn from her chest. He has to know what it means.

 

“I’m need to stay.”

 

“Sorry it doesn’t work like that,” Fangs shrugs and tips his head. “Time to go”

 

Through force of stubborn, curious, will and gritted teeth he manages to turn away from the pull, from the seductive warmth of a peaceful ever after to focus again on the trembling woman in his hospital room. “No!”

 

Maybe he is a masochist after all.

 

“You’re a stubborn bastard Jones,” then Fangs is gone taking that welcoming warmth with him and leaving Jughead to watch Veronica sag with relief as the machines take up their doom-laden beeping again.

 

He doesn’t know if he’s condemned himself to an eternity in limbo but he soon realises he’s certainly condemned the living to a little longer in purgatory,

 

Over the next few days he watches them keep their vigil at his bedside. Shuffling grief infected zombies passing round bad coffee and talking in short whispered sentences. He hears the doctor telling his father that there’s no hope. That it’s time to switch off the machines that sustain his son. FP curses and refuses. Clinging to a hope he sees Betty has already relinquished. She comes daily, each day she cries fewer tears, each day she looks a little stronger.

 

“He’s gone Arch” she’s tough and gentle with his old friend when Archie insists through tears that he might still pull through. “We have to get ready to let him go.”

 

Being perpetually dis-attached from your own body makes people watching, already a hobby of his, literally the only thing he has to combat the ennui of limbo. He sees Alice Cooper put aside her not inconsiderable troubles and come to his father’s side looking more humane than he’s ever imagined she could be.

 

He watches in wonder as she finger-combs his father’s hair while FP cries and curses Jughead’s mother, who he gathers has declared coming to see her only son before he dies too much disruption for his younger sister. He wonders if Jellybean even knows he’s dying. He never saw her cry, perhaps she’s simply forgotten him.

 

He sees other things too, things that break his barely beating heart. He sees Archie at his bedside blaming himself for this. He sees Betty take his best friends chin in her hands and tell him emphatically that he is not to blame. He sees her kiss him. He sees Archie kiss her back, right in front of his unconscious body and wishes he didn’t begrudge them that comfort so much.

 

He sees Veronica slip in late at night when the others have gone, a folded twenty slipped into the hand of the security guard. She sits primly at his bedside and studies the machines that keep him alive and not his battered face. A secret solitary vigil that leaves little doubt what feeling could bring her, night after night, hour after hour, to his side. It’s many nights before she speaks.

 

“You should come back Jughead” she says conversationally as if just thinking of it, her eyes finally settling, dark and inscrutable, on his face. “I wish you’d just come back”

 

And with that, suddenly, the pain re-ignites in his body, pulsing agonisingly in time with his barely beating heart.

 

 

When he finally opens his eyes Betty’s beautiful face greets him. Tears and smiles. “God Jug, I thought we’d lost you.”

 

He can’t talk around the tubes in his mouth but he can grasp her hand and the pain goes away for the briefest fraction of a second.

 

He doesn’t think about what he saw, the illusions that accompanied his coma, until the serpents file in a few days later. Toni takes Betty’s usual chair at his bedside and her make up gets streaked with tears even as she swears at him. “You’re a prick Jug. I thought you were gonna fucking die”

 

Sweetpea watches from the far wall, arms crossed. “That was some dumb shit Jones,” he spits, his voice unmistakably hostile.

 

“Enough Sweets, we’re all onto your man crush on Jug now.” Toni teases as she wipes her eyes and turns to Jughead with a wicked grin. “He was going out of his mind. Swearing bloody vengeance, punching walls. All that shit”

 

“Punching walls? For me?” his battered face hurts at the smug look he manufactures. “Never knew you cared so much”

 

“Fuck off,” Sweetpea bristles defensively enough that he doesn’t doubt the veracity of Toni’s words. “That’s bullshit.”

 

“There’s still blood on the wall,” Toni goads her friend gleefully. “So, forget about denying it Pea.”

 

An image from his coma crystallises in his mind, sharp and clear. “Wait, blood? Was this at the Wyrm?”

 

“Yeah”

 

“Was Cheryl there?” he asks urgently and tries to sit up despite the agony in his ribs. He has to know if what he saw was real. Because if it was real in the Wyrm maybe it was real at his bedside when Betty kissed Archie, and maybe, and this thought makes his heart thunder uncomfortably in his chest, maybe it was real in Archie’s bedroom too.

 

“Do we need to worry about brain damage?” Toni asks with that lopsided smile-frown of hers. “You’re being weird Jones.”

 

“Toni,” he growls impatiently.

 

“Gees yes she was there. Why’d you even care?”

 

He doesn’t say, “because I saw it.” It’s not them he needs to talk to. It’s not their grief he doesn’t understand or their betrayal he needs to confront.

 

He’ll start, he decides almost immediately, with Veronica. Because, if he’s wrong, if what he’d seen had been merely the construct of his unconscious mind then he’d rather embarrass himself in front of her, than start throwing accusations at Betty and Archie.

 

It’s several long frustrating days before he finally sees Veronica alone. Visit after visit she lurks in the background as Betty and Archie sit at his side. Usually standing near the door, passing the odd disinterested comment or pretending to look at her phone as she glances at him from under her lashes.

 

“Good afternoon” she wears a cream blouse and an air hostess’ smile when she finally comes in alone. “Betty’s dad has his preliminary hearing today and I told Archie to go be there for her. I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with second string friends and passing acquaintances today”

 

He watches her silently until she becomes uncomfortable and gives him an annoyed look. “What?”

 

“Are you in love with me?” he hadn’t meant to be so direct but its been days. Days with his mind on a loop replaying her break down till he knows every sound of it by heart. Days of counting up the hours she must have spent secretly at his side. Days of watching her pretend she isn't watching him. It’s exhausting, this constant speculation, this not quite certainty.

 

It takes her less than a second to compose herself but he sees her eyes widen and her fingers flex. Then she laughs, almost, but not quite, convincingly enough to make him doubt himself. “Do I need to fetch a doctor? That sounds like the concussion talking”

 

“I saw you,” his voice is quiet but unwavering as he levels his gaze on hers. “In Archie’s room. I saw you crying”

 

She makes a slightly jerky gesture with her hand which he thinks is supposed to be dismissive and her elegant throat undulates as she swallows. “That is the most ridiculous th-”

 

“You held my shirt against your face,” he cuts off another denial because he’s so damn sure now that she’s lying. “And you cried. You cried like your heart had been ripped out through your rib cage.”

 

Her lips press together in response and he sees her physically gather her strength as she sits a little straighter and clasps her hands in her lap. “How could you know that?”

 

“I saw it. I saw everyone. I took some screwed up wonderful life fucking spirit walk around my nearest and dearest.” Her face has gone pale at his words and her eyes are wide and guilty. “No one cried for me like you did. So, tell me the truth Veronica. Are you in love with me?”

 

She tries again for a dismissive laugh falling even shorter of convincing this time. “An out of body experience? I thought you were a cynic Jones”

 

“Veronica, stop” he grasps her arm and she jumps at the contact, gaze flaring with something he knows to be true and yet won’t fully believe until he hears her name it. “Tell me the truth.”

 

She looks down at his hand against her skin and he sees the fight go out of her with a gush of air that sounds oddly like relief. “Yes,” she whispers as if to her confessor. “Yes, I’m in love with you,” she lifts her chin and her gaze sharpens in defiance, she never was one to back down. “Happy?”

 

“Not even remotely,” he snaps. He’d been hoping he was wrong, even knowing he wasn’t, he’d still hoped he’d that maybe he was wrong. “Christ, since whe-“

 

“Since always,” she brings her free hand up and lays the fingertips on the back of his hand where it still lies against her arm, chased and intimate. “Since I got to this hell hole of a town.”

 

“But you-“

 

“Never said anything?” she gives him a chiding look and flattens her palm over his hand trapping it lightly. “You love Betty,” her shoulder rises and falls in a casual shrug that belies the shackled emotion in her eyes. “So.”

 

She has a point. What would her admission have been other than a wedge between them all? He frowns and thinks back across the months he’s known her, groping for a single moment where he should have seen this. He can think of only one.

 

“At your parents’ cabin, when you,” he pauses and considers freeing his hand from the warm trap of her grip. But he’s sore and tired and he can’t muster the strength. So instead he takes a deep breath and tries to keep his gaze steady on hers despite the surges of adrenaline he can feel - that she too must be able to feel - vibrating under his skin. “When you kissed me. That wasn’t about levelling the playing field at all.”

 

Her thumb has started brushing a gentle soothing rhythm against his wrist and he should definitely try and summon the energy to pull away. She laughs ruefully. “We Lodges are nothing if not opportunistic,” she looks away for a moment then back to his eyes. “I’ve been holding this for a long time. I guess I hoped maybe you’d know. I’d kiss you and somehow you’d just know.”

 

He shakes his head replaying the memory of her hand on his neck as her tongue boldly parted his lips. “I just put it down to you being a really good kisser.”

 

She smirks. “Oh, I am.”

 

Her hand rolls smoothly over his as she gently slips her fingertips under the palm, coaxing his fingers to lace together with hers. He looks down to see his own thumb has taken up a gentle circular caress against her wrist and jerks it away, the sudden movement setting off miniature thunderstorms of pain all over his body.

 

“Christ,” he breathes as he tries to will away the wash of agony that follows. She’s watching him with doleful eyes, fingers reaching tentatively to offer comfort. “Don’t,” he rasps harshly. “This is fucked up Veronica,” the pain in his body and the confusion in his mind conspire to fuel a rush of bileful anger. “This could screw everything up. Jesus why couldn’t you just, fucking not?”

 

The tenderness in her eyes gives way to a bright harsh flare of answering anger. “I did just _fucking not_ Jughead,” she retorts hotly. “I’ve been _not_ for months. No one was ever supposed to know, least of all you. So, don’t blame me for what you saw when _you_ invaded a private moment.”

 

“Oh, my fucking bad Veronica,” sarcasm, his most comfortable armour, wraps itself around his tone. “Did my near-death experience compromised your privacy? I’m sorry that my spirit took an astral fucking walk out of my almost corpse and y-”

 

“Don’t,” she gasps. Her hand flies to her mouth and it trembles visibly as she draws it away. “Don’t say that. Jesus Jughead we almost lost you.”

 

A single tear slips from her eye and runs unchecked down her cheek. “V, I’m sorry,” he’s instantly contrite at the sight of her tears. “Don’t” he says more gently, a tiny crack in his voice as another tear follows neatly in the tracks of the first. “Don’t cry, I’m sorry.”

 

He raises a hand ignoring the protests of his body and smudges it against her cheekbone with his thumb. She leans into the touch and he can almost feel the yearning in her. Veronica Lodge, this incomparable beauty. This smart, fierce, wilful princess. She wants him. She wants the trailer park trash kid with the gang affiliations and the alcoholic father. With the decade old laptop and four t-shirts to his name. It’s impossible and yet he feels her desire through the tingling skin of his palm which, without his permission, has flattened against her cheek.

 

He doesn’t want her, he never has. Except perhaps once. In Pop’s when they first met, in the split second after they’d walked in when he’d imagined, or told himself back then he’d imagined, she’d forgotten Archie and looked only at him.

 

Although, and this thought he can barely admit to himself. Perhaps there was another moment. Perhaps when she’d kissed him in the hot tub of her father’s lodge, with her hand insistently pulling his lips against hers and her tongue boldly forcing its way into his mouth. Perhaps just for a moment he’d kissed her back not to level the playing field or even to irk Archie but simply because it had felt so damn good.

 

“What do we do?” he asks and she nuzzles her cheek briefly against his palm before sitting back and giving him a steely look.

 

“Nothing,” she declares firmly. “You get out of here and Betty nurses you tenderly back to health. Archie takes me to prom and we shine like the perfect high school couple we are. In short, we pretend none of this ever happened”

 

“Veronica.”

 

“Oh, I’ll get over you Jughead Jones the Third,” she throws out a sassy wink and he’s struck by how mercurial she can be. “You’re not that cute you know.”

 

He nods and she stands to leave. “Betty sent these,” she tells him as she places the box of cookies she’d brought with her on his bedside table and starts to turn away.

 

He’d forgotten briefly why he’d initiated this conversation, too dumbstruck by the truth of her feelings for him to remember that if what he saw in Archie’s bedroom was real then so to was what he saw at this very bedside. “They kissed.”

 

“What?”

 

“Another fun revelation for ghost Jughead,” he shifts in the bed, his battered body refusing to find a comfortable position. “Betty and Archie kissed again while I was out. Not much of a kiss, but not nothing either.”

 

“Of course they did.” She looks resigned and slightly disappointed but far from heartbroken. “Are you okay? It was probably just stress or grief or whatever. Betty loves you.”

 

“Possibly, probably, yeah,” there's a pain in his right side that’s sending waves of nausea through his body and he has a headache that’s building from intense to blinding. He has a button he can press to ease those agonies, the pain in his heart isn’t so easily dulled. “But I’m not a fool Veronica, I know that if she could choose, no harm no foul, she’d chose Archie.”

 

“I’d choose you,” she’s not consoling him nor trying to seduce him. She’s simply stating a fact.

 

He gives a small sad laugh, amused and dejected by how royally the universe loves to fuck with him. “Would you now?”

 

Without answering she walks to the door, the click of her heels crisp and loud in the quiet of his room. Framed in the doorway she turns to look at him over her shoulder with cool untroubled eyes. “Every time.”

 


	2. Selflessness of heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I dunno maybe I should just go. Just get out of the way and let them be happy"
> 
> “Great, and what happens to me while you’re off martyring yourself?” Veronica rolls her eyes, composure already regained. “Left playing third wheel?”
> 
> He shrugs, “Come with me maybe?” her eyebrow arches in response and he back tracks with an embarrassing stutter. “I, I, er I don’t mean, I’m not say-”
> 
> “Ok, calm down,” there’s a knowing amusement in the twitch of her lips as she lays her hand on his arm to halt his stammering. “I know what you’re not asking.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who commented on the first chapter. And thanks to those who overcame suspicion of out of body experiences to keep reading. You'll see form this chapter that it really doesn't feature much from now on anyway.
> 
> Hope you like this chapter

 

Getting back to normal following his discharge from hospital is surprisingly easy. In the wake of the riots the town falls into a stolid sort of stasis. A holding pattern of listless normality in which it’s easy to, if not forget, then at least ignore, the horrors and revelations of the spring.

 

The four of them spend their evenings in Pop’s with Archie’s arm slung over Veronica’s shoulder and Betty’s hand placed gently, wary of aggravating his still healing injuries, on Jughead’s thigh.

 

He doesn’t confront Betty about the kiss and Veronica doesn’t confront Archie. He thinks he would if his body didn’t still hurt so much. If the broken bones and ruptured spleen didn’t still keep him in a regular supply of daily agony. He’s probably lying to himself. He’s probably just weak and afraid and still pathetic enough to take whatever he can from Betty. Even if somewhere deep inside he admits he can’t live forever on the scraps from Archie’s table.

 

He and Veronica continue to lock horns over everything, from the group’s plans for the long evenings to the quality of one another’s taste in movies, but his eyes linger on her now, searching, always, for evidence of what she confessed to him that day at the hospital. The admission of love neither has spoken of since.

 

Summer moves idly onwards, meandering like the half-filled river they spend so much time besides. The contrast between its leisurely summer flow and the wild rush of winter could easily be a metaphor for the way a frantic year of mysteries and murders has given way to the ennui of long, hot, uneventful days.

 

“Stop that,” Veronica says without looking on one such balmy evening in late august when, with Archie working on the Jalopy’s bodywork and Betty busy under the hood, they find themselves alone on the Andrews’ porch drinking ice tea.

 

“What?”

 

“You’re watching me again,” she turns her eyes on him with a wry playfulness that makes them sparkle in the evening sun. “Looking for evidence of my infatuation.”

 

A blush rises on the back of his neck and he retreats behind humour to hide how embarrassed he feels at having fallen short of subtle in his observation of her. “Are you downgrading me Veronica?” he gives her a cheeky look filed with faux hurt. “What will I be by the end of the summer? Just a crush?”

 

She lifts her sculpted eyebrows and her dark berry lips purse as she tames a mirroring smile. “I’m considering it actually. This whole automotive renovation project,” she makes an airy waving gesture towards the garage. “Has cast you in a less than masculine light Jughead Jones. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

 

He grins sheepishly. Yes, he knows he’s an idiot with cars. He really just doesn’t care enough about them to bother working out which end of what goes where. “Gender stereotyping hurts men too Veronica,” he fires back, relaxing into their playful teasing. “Sheesh, try to be a bit more progressive.”

 

He’d been honestly more than a little freaked out by her confession of love at his hospital bedside weeks before. But she’s hidden it so perfectly, acted so naturally, that at times he’s convinced himself he imagined the whole thing. There should be an elephant carrying a banner emblazoned “Unrequited Love” following them around but somehow there isn’t. There’s just bickering and eye rolls and a secret almost completely hidden even from him.

 

But then she laughs and when their eyes meet he sees it, just for an instant, he sees a flash of adoration burst across her gaze as brief and bright as a firework. The iridescence almost blinds him and his heart does a sort of swoop and drop right out of his chest to settle, beating sluggishly, in the sudden nervous churning in his gut.

 

“How do you do it?” he asks impulsively, because he’s spent the whole summer wondering about the quality of her charade. “Hide it so well?”

 

She tips her head and her onyx sheened hair falls gracefully over her shoulder. Her expression turns soft and serious and he gets the feeling she understands a subtext in his question that he himself . “It’s not that hard. I’m not spending every waking moment pining over you Jughead. It’s more background noise. I just tune it out.”

 

He nods and she takes in his furrowed brow with sympathetic eyes. “You’re wondering if Betty’s doing the same thing aren’t you? If I can hide that I’m in love with you, she can hide her feelings for Archie?”

 

A non-committal noise is all he can muster in response to her perceptiveness, and her candour, and his fingernails have suddenly become extraordinarily interesting.

 

“Well for one thing,” Veronica immediately offers her reassurance in a bright confident tone. “Betty isn’t half the actress I am, and for another, does it matter?”

 

His gaze snaps up, wide with startled disbelief. “Hear me out,” she holds up a hand to stay the indignant retort forming on his mouth. “If you get your first choice does it really matter that you’re their second? Speaking from experience here. I adore Archie. He makes me happy and I make him happy. There’s honestly nothing I wouldn’t do for him. So, does it actually matter? What I feel for you?”

 

He watches her, wondering if that’s just talk or if she means it. In the end the need to know makes him bold in a way that he’d never could have predicted he’d be with her. “If I asked you to get on my bike tonight,” he challenges. “Run away with me to some shitty apartment in New York. If I asked you to, would you trade? Archie for me. Your pearls for a leather jacket and your mimosas for a spliff?” He turns towards her and leans in so his hair flops over his eyes and he has to look up through his lashes.  “Would you get on my bike and trade daddy’s American Express for unpaid bills and crappy jobs? Your penthouse luxury for fucking on a mattress on the floor?”

 

Its uncharacteristic for him to throw out sexual references so baldly, but it’s part of what he needs to understand, of her, of himself, of Betty most of all. So, he presses the heels of his boots hard into the deck and lifts his challenging gaze to meet her startled one. Her breath comes in a harsh quick puff and her pupils dilate and he knows her answer.

 

Yes, she’d run out on Archie. In a heartbeat she’d jump on his bike and ride to whatever low rent dive he found for them and, yes, she would definitely fuck him on that hypothetical mattress on the floor. The realisation sends an unexpected rush of blood southward and his cock twitches eagerly in his jeans.

 

“Christ” he mutters and runs his hand over his face as he tries to beat back a phantasm of his own creation. Veronica Lodge spread out on a dirty sheet-less mattress, her naked body luminous in the grey Brooklyn light, lips parted, pupils blown, waiting for him.

 

“You would,” he thought his voice would be harsh but it’s soft. Commiserating where he thought it would accuse. “And so would Betty. That’s why it matters. I love Betty and Archie. I owe them both everything. I dunno maybe I should just go. Just get out of the way and let them be happy.”

 

“Great, and what happens to me while you’re off martyring yourself?” she rolls her eyes, composure already regained. “Left playing third wheel?”

 

He shrugs, “Come with me maybe?” her eyebrow arches in response and he back tracks with an embarrassing stutter. “I, I, er I don’t mean, I’m not say-”

 

“Ok, calm down,” there’s a knowing amusement in the twitch of her lips as she lays her hand on his arm to halt his stammering.  “I know what you’re not asking.”

 

The easy way she brushes off his embarrassment makes him relax and he slumps down into his chair with a pensive sigh. “This town doesn’t hold much for either of us does it?”

 

“I guess not,” she looks thoughtful for a moment and he knows she’s thinking about her family, who she’s been avoiding as much as humanly possible all summer. “And believe me I have enough personal funds squirrelled away that the crappy apartment could have two actually bedrooms with real beds”

 

His smile is sad and lopsided but one hundred percent genuine for all that. “Lap of luxury then?”

 

“Naturally,” Veronica gives him a pointed look. “You think I’d accept anything less?”

 

He smirks and she flicks her hair, then Betty and Archie appear and its milkshakes at Pop’s and back to normal. The thought won’t budge though. The thought of running. Of quitting the heartache of this town and letting Archie and Betty be together. The ultimate act of nobility. True selflessness of heart.

 

Veronica doesn’t mention the conversation again but he feels something shift around them after that. The half formed secret floats like mist in the air between them a cool constant against in which he can’t help but find her eyes and speak to her with almost smirks and barely smiles that she answers with the faintest lift of her eyebrows and stealthy touches of her tongue to the back of her teeth.

 

He watches Betty and Archie, but they’ve always loved each other and he can’t remember a time when Betty’s eyes didn’t brighten at the sight of him. Perhaps that should be answer enough for his dilemma.

 

One night, near the river, they sit around a camp-fire while Archie plays a new song, a love song, and Jughead thinks Betty’s eyes glisten slightly in the firelight. That night he goes to the Pembrooke and Veronica lets him in without a word and pours two large glasses of red wine.

 

“The song?” she asks eventually and he studies his glass and nods.

 

“I’m leaving.”

 

“When?” She snatches up her phone and pulls a pocket book from her bag with brisk, efficient, movements. “I’ll need to liquidise some assets.”

 

He’s taken aback by the immediacy of her response. “You were serious? About coming?”

 

“Of course. Besides if I stay what’s the point in you leaving? I’ll still be in the way,” she flicks the pages of her pocket book and her gaze darts between it and the screen of her phone. “I have a couple of thousand I can get my hands on straight away but the rest will take a few months to release.”

 

He’s aware that he’s gaping at her but he can’t seem to get his jaw to snap shut. He’d come in the hope of what? Comfort? Uncompromising common sense? To be dissuaded?

 

Veronica notices he’s staring and gives him an impatient, irritated, look. “Jughead, you can’t head out into the great unknown all alone. You’re far from the worldly badass you think you are,” she puts her things away and settles her eyes on his. “I on the other hand,” her fingers come to lie regally on her own chest. “Am the shrewd and wealthy daughter of a New York mobster. You need me.”

 

“That is actually a valid point,” the tension in his shoulder seeps away, funny he hadn’t realised until this exact moment how much he’d hoped she’d actually leave with him. He gives her a crooked self-deprecating smile. “Can we salve my beleaguered masculinity with the notion that I can provide the means of our escape?”

 

“Yes,” her eyes dance with amusement, they always did get each other’s dry humour. “The motorcycle will certainly provide a suitably dramatic aesthetic.”

 

The next night he straps panniers to his bike and throws in his few meagre possessions, leaving as much room as possible for Veronica’s. He drives to Betty’s house and asks her to come out so they can talk away from her mother’s distrustful gaze.

 

Betty frowns in confusion at the loaded bike. “What’s going on Juggie?” she asks without suspicion and the nausea that’s been building at the prospect of telling her he’s going tastes strong and sour at the back of his throat.

 

“I’m leaving,” he replies bluntly and tries to ignore the way his chest seems to cave in on itself at the sight of her huge questioning eyes. “I’m leaving Riverdale.”

 

“Where are you going?”

 

“I don’t know,” he shrugs and wishes fervently that this could just be over. “Anywhere. Anywhere else.”

 

“Why?” her voice catches on the word and her eyes are awash with tears. Wide and green, beautiful and questioning and yet, and this hurts the most, still so trusting.

 

“I know about the kiss Betty. The second kiss” Betty’s expression morphs from lost to guilty and the part of him that had hoped against hoped that he was mistaken dies, not with a cry of anguish but with a sigh of heartbroken acceptance. “I’m not mad,” he assures her gently. “I’m really not. But I’m done being second choice. I shouldn’t have to and you shouldn’t have to settle. You deserve better”

 

“You’re not my second choice,” her hands come to cup his face in a way that’s so tender and familiar, so utterly _them,_ that he feels the cracks across his heart widen into gaping bloodied fissures. “It was nothing, Jug, just a stupid scared moment.”

 

“Once was a scared moment Betty, twice,” he takes her hands in his, peeling them away from his face and pushing them down towards her belly. “Twice was something else. I love you, I always will. But I need to get out of the way. Out of your way. Out of Archie’s”

 

“Jughead,” she frees her hands and reaches for him again so that he has to step back to avoid her touch and sliding his eyes away from the swirl of guilt and regret in salt and sea-water gaze. “This is crazy. Archie’s with Veronica-”

 

“No, he’s not.” Veronica appears from across the street with a pleasingly small amount of luggage carried in two soft cases that he takes from her and begins packing into the panniers. “Jughead’s right. You and Archie deserve to be happy and neither of us are inclined to stand in the way.”

 

Betty looks in confusion from where he’s packing Veronica’s things carefully into the panniers to take in the other girl’s leather jacket and tight black jeans. “You’re leaving together?”

 

Then Archie comes storming out of his front door and it’s not the parting Jughead had hoped for at all. There’s anger. Snarled accusations from Archie, “Are you fucking her?” and from Veronica leaping to his defence. “Where the hell do you get off Archibald? You kissed his girlfriend not the other way around.”

 

There are tears. From Betty, “Please Juggie, I made a mistake, I’m sorry, I love you.” From him, “Don’t Betts, please. I love you too but it’s for the best.”

 

In the end, when the yelling and the tears are done, there’s just Veronica slipping onto the bike behind him and whispering in his ear. “We’ll be okay Jughead. I promise?”

 

It’s odd he thinks, as the wind whips around them and the drone of the bike lulls a little calmness into his rigid body, that he believes her.

 

They head north east towards Springfield just the other side of the Massachusettsborder with a vague plan to visit four states in three days. Starting with the Dr Seuss World and then down to Providence for the River walk and back through Connecticut - where there are apparently some really old boats - and finally New York to find a place to start a new life.

 

It’s in a motel on the state line as he lies in the dark facing the wall that the reality of what they’re doing hits him somewhere deep in his gut, jostling for space with the burgers Veronica had bought him earlier, making him feel nauseous and pathetic.

 

He’d left Betty crying on the side-walk. He’d left Archie who’d looked at him with anger and confusion as if he couldn’t work out who this imposter in his old friend’s skin was. He’d left his dad who’d nodded and who’s troubled eyes had spoken worryingly of understanding - he’s not sure he wants to be a kindred to his father - “Do what ya gotta do son. But remember there’s no shame in coming home okay, any time?”

 

Riverdale had, he’d imagined at least, made him feel older than his 16 years. He’d thought of himself as having had to grow up too fast. Dealing with everything from homelessness to murder, gangs to alcoholism. Now, hundreds of miles away from home in a cheap motel in a strange city, he feels like a child. Afraid of an uncertain future and all the unfamiliar things it holds.

 

Already he misses Betty with a painful intensity and the question of whether he should have trusted Veronica’s wisdom and simply enjoyed being with her, whatever her feelings for Archie, plays through his mind on repeat.

 

Eventually he cries, sad lonely tears that he struggles to keep silent, the snuffle of his breath amplified by the darkness.

 

He’s praying Veronica’s a deep sleeper when he hears her bed creak and two muffled footfalls as she crosses to his. Then the covers lift and she slips in behind him, her body barely touching his back and her hand resting high on his arm.

 

“You okay?” she whispers into the space between his shoulder blades, her breath warm even through his t-shirt

 

He shakes his head and grasp her hand pulling her arms more tightly around his middle. “Not really, you?”

 

“I am actually,” she sighs and he feels her concern for him in the waterfall of warm air flowing over his neck. “Do you wanna go back?”

 

He thinks about her question. Does he? The humiliation of returning so soon aside, does he want to go back? Surprisingly the answer is still no. No, he doesn’t want to live in a town which dealt him shitty hand after shitty hand since kindergarten and no, he does not want to love a girl who loves a boy who isn’t him.

 

“No,” he breathes, feeling more certain than he sounds. “No. I’ll be fine”

 

“Alright,” she murmurs and starts to roll away from him. He grabs her arms and pulls it around his own body. He’ll be okay, but he thinks he’ll be more okay if she doesn’t let him go right now.

 

Veronica doesn’t question the action, she just snuggles in behind him and gives him a reassuring squeeze. “Good night, Jughead”

 

Surprisingly he actually enjoys Massachusetts. He takes a picture of Veronica posing under plastic truffula trees with a model of the Lorax and makes her laugh as he recites the childish rhymes in a dramatic voice over as they explore amongst the boisterous children and harassed mothers. Afterwards they through the float through the sun-drenched streets in a bubble of unreality and eat ice cream on the steps of the museum.

 

The motel in Providence where they stay the next night has no twin rooms. “I’ll be a gentleman, Jughead,” Veronica assures him impatiently when he hesitates at the desk. “We shared last night, I’m sure I can keep my hands to myself”

 

In the dark he doesn’t want her to. He reaches across the sheets between them, fumbling to link his fingers with hers and they talk in hushed whispers about what they’ll do when they reach New York. She has a plan and he’s beyond grateful she’s here. Without her he’d probably already be slinking back home with his tail between his legs.

 

Sleep brings them together and he wakes to her spooning him, small and warm against his back, with her arm trapped under his and her hand lying over his heart. “Thank you,” he whispers, knowing she’s asleep but wanting to hear those words out loud himself so he doesn’t forget how much he owes her for coming with him.

 

He owes her money. She pays for the room again the next night, while he pays only for fuel and the occasional snack. In New York she checks them into a cheap motel, a bed each this time, and waves him off as he drags the dwindling collection crumpled bills from his jacket.

 

By day she’s a whirlwind of flat hunting and job seeking, “We need work, Jughead. If we are going to have any chance of paying for college we have to save”

 

She’s thinking about college. He might feel like a drifter and a runaway but she’s planning long term, budgeting for a bright future. He owes her so much more than money.

 

Veronica manages to enrol them at a surprisingly well-maintained High School in Flatbush, although how she does so without ever producing a supervising adult he’s sure he’ll never know, and finds them a flat in Canarsie. As promised, it has two bedrooms, it also has dirty curtains and extremely ratty furniture.

 

He hates it. Not for himself. It’s better than the closets and projection booths he’s called home. Hell, it’s no worse than the trailer to be honest. He hates it for her. Watching her look around with a sigh before telling the landlord that they’ll take it makes him feel like a prize shit. She had everything and now she’s being dragged into his crappy world of broken kitchen cabinets and mould half way up the bathroom walls.

 

The Friday night before they’re due to move in she comes back to the motel from a job interview at a local coffee shop sporting a breezy smile. “Good evening Jughead”

 

“Hey.”

 

“You’ll be pleased to hear Veronica Lodge is now a proud member of the great American workforce,” she tumbles elegantly onto the bed beside him as he lays down his book. “I start tomorrow, so you’ll have to get the key from Mr Heckles”

 

“Veee,” he chides half-heartedly. “You seriously have to stop calling him that or I’m gonna do it to his face.”

 

He collects the key soon after she disappears for her first day at work and sets about putting the hundred dollars his father wired him to good use. When she comes home seven hours later the whole place smells of cheap laundry powered, bleach, and garlic.

 

She looks across the short space between their front door and tiny open plan kitchen where he’s stirring a simmering pot of ham and lentil soup. “Jughead, are you cooking?”

 

“Yes,” he turns down the hob and skips over to her, taking her coat from her and hanging it on the hooks he’s installed by the door. She wanders the small space taking in the freshly washed curtains, the new, second hand, throws brightening the couch and the goodwill coffee table where his laptop sits.

 

The fridge and cupboards are sparsely stocked with tins and vegetables, and he’s scrubbed the bathroom walls so hard that in places the paint has actually worn away.

 

“This is great Jughead,” Veronica’s smile is small but sincere.

 

“There’s more,” he leads her the few short paces to the door of the room he decided would be hers, the one with an actual window, and pushes it open for her to step inside. Her bed has the cheapest new linen he could find including a midnight blue comforter that matches the small rug beside the bed. In front of the tacky seventies style dressing table he’s placed and ostentatious red velvet chair he picked up in a junk shop around the corner for just a few dollars and a string of fairy lights sparkle gaily around the mirror.

 

Veronica’s face floods with emotion as she takes in the room and she turns to him with glistening eyes. “Thank you.”

 

“After everything you’ve done, I think trying to make this place a bit less depressing is the absolute least I could do.”

 

Her smile warms but remains tired and he wonders if she’s had a hard day in her new job. “Well mission accomplished. It’s really great Jughead”

 

“Oh, you haven’t heard the best bit yet,” he waves grandly back towards his laptop in the living room. “Wanna watch Netflix after dinner?”

 

“Wait you got internet?” her smile fades, replaced by a worried frown. “Jug we can’t afford that.”

 

“No, we can’t. But I met our neighbour, Missy, who very generously shared her WiFi password,” she relaxes and his smile gets a little goofy with how pleased he is with himself for securing streaming video for her. “A month’s free trial in my name, a month in yours, then we’ll switch to Amazon Prime and we’re golden until Christmas”

 

She laughs then, the tiredness in her gaze giving way to and answering smile as if his pleasure is a contagion she’s more than happy to catch. “Well then hoorah for Missy. Is that even still a name? She sounds like a sweet old lady”

 

“Hardly,” he moves back to the kitchen as he answers distractedly. “She’s a second-year at CUNY. Sociology.”

 

Veronica expression flickers momentarily with something he can’t quite interpret and when it passes her smile if a tiny bit less natural. “Wonderful, I can’t wait to meet her,” she says brightly. “Let’s eat and enjoy some free TV.”

 

Later when they’re watching a reality TV show of her choosing that’s so incredibly inane that he feels like his brain wants to make an escape out of his ear she turns to him and, in a voice softer than anything he’s ever heard from her, thanks him.

 

Her gaze is thoughtful and sincere and it makes his throat feel clogged enough that his answering, “Your welcome,” comes out a little choked.

 

Her smile is slight and subtle before she turns back to the screen and yet it feels strangely like a gift. He decides he’ll make her a better dinner tomorrow night and tunes out of the show in favour of wondering what she might like for desert.


	3. City life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she puts away her nail polish and declares this a good day for ‘Team Jeronica’ it’s with genuine amusement, and no small measure of affection, that he tells her that’s ridiculous.
> 
> “Hey,” she scolds him seriously. “Every BroTP needs its ship name. So, unless you prefer Vughead or Lones it’s Jeronica”
> 
> He reaches up to retrieve the salt and pepper from the shelf as he answers. “It sounds like we’re jumping off something”
> 
> She doesn’t respond and he looks over his shoulder to see her watching him with fathomless eyes and a curious tilt of her head. “Aren’t we?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I is a bit sleepy for note writing
> 
> I love you guys, and feedback and I hope this chapter makes you happy
> 
> That's the usual gist isn't it?

Job hunting for Jughead doesn’t go nearly as smoothly as it did for Veronica. By the end of the week he’s had four interviews and four solid rejections. The simmering panic that he’s not going to find work, and consequently won’t be able to contribute more to their new life in the city than cleaning the flat and working his way through a battered second-hand copy of ‘Eating on a Budget’, is reaching boiling point.

 

He’s trawling through the help wanted adds while yet another soup bubbles on the hob when Veronica gets home from a shift at the coffee shop. She takes in his deep frown and wild hair, his beanie lost somewhere on the floor after he threw it off in frustration, and sends him a commiserating grimace. “Nothing?”

 

“Not much,” he sighs. “There’s a comic book store a few blocks away that’ll see me tomorrow, but I’m fairly certain they’ll be as underwhelmed as everybody else. I’m sorry Veronica, you’re doing everything and I can’t even-”

 

“It’s been a week Jughead,” she cuts him off, the exasperated tone accompanied by her patented eye-roll. “Let’s not spiral just yet.”

 

He feels a scowl settle easily on his face at her dismissive tone. How much better, he thinks as his melancholia begins to drain away in a wash of annoyance, her impatience than coddling or sympathy. How much easier for someone like him to handle. She throws herself down on the couch and pulls off her heels. “You didn’t over garlic the soup again did you? I swear my breath affected my tips today.”

 

A comfortably familiar feeling of irritation drives away the last of his bad mood and he glares at her half-heartedly. “Feel free to not eat it,” he says as he places two bowls on the counter and starts cutting slices of slightly stale bread.

 

Veronica shrugs and waits for him to bring her meal over, arching an eyebrow haughtily when he places it in front of her with a facetious “ma’m” and a small bow.

 

They watch and episode of Black Mirror on Netflix after dinner. Half way through he catches her looking at him. “What?”

 

“Leave your hat off for your interview tomorrow,” she says thoughtfully, eyeing his hair. “Wear your leather jacket too.”

 

“For an interview?”

 

Her smile is enigmatic as she turns back to the screen. “Trust me.”

 

She’s sitting on the couch in a silk robe painting her toenails when he returns from his successful, if baffling, interview at the comic book store the next day. His expression must be easy to read because her smirk is a study in knowing amusement. “Well?” she asks, though he’s certain she knows exactly how it went.

 

“Yeah, I start Monday after school. They didn’t seem much interested in my experience,” he hangs his jacket up and runs a hand through his uncovered hair. “I’m not entirely sure why they hired me.”

 

“Really?” her eyes are laughing as she turns and gestures to him with the miniature brush. “Oh, come on Jughead it’s not a huge leap to imagine that a couple of comic store geeks might be more interested in the reflected cool of a smoke show in a leather jacket than in your ability to work a cash register.”

 

Heat rises in his cheeks at her words. Day to day she makes it easy to forget that she once confessed feelings for him. Feelings that presumably, though he hasn’t allowed himself to examine this too closely or too often, come with some level of sexual attraction. When she baldly states that he’s attractive, physically, he finds himself tongue tied and feet shufflingly nervous. “They did say something unintelligible about ‘chicks’” he mutters.

 

Veronica laughs musically and goes back to painting her nails. “What’s for dinner?” she asks without looking at him.

 

Maybe it should annoy him that even when she’s home all afternoon she assumes he’ll do the cooking yet again. But he finds her presumption is quickly becoming as comfortable, and comforting, as the feel of his beanie pulled down over his ears. When she puts away her nail polish and declares this a good day for ‘Team Jeronica’ it’s with genuine amusement, and no small measure of affection, that he tells her that’s ridiculous.

 

“Hey,” she scolds him seriously. “Every BroTP needs its ship name. So, unless you prefer Vughead or Lones it’s Jeronica”

 

He reaches up to retrieve the salt and pepper from the shelf as he answers. “It sounds like we’re jumping off something”

 

She doesn’t respond and he looks over his shoulder to see her watching him with fathomless eyes and a curious tilt of her head. “Aren’t we?”

 

He considers her question briefly before shrugging his agreement. “I guess,” he replies and for the first time since leaving Riverdale he feels a tiny echo of her optimism.

 

High school starts a couple of days later and without the greater stress of looking for a job he finds his anxiety at the prospect of starting a new school in a strange city building exponentially with every passing hour.

 

He needn’t have worried. It seems that high school as Jughead Jones; motorcycle riding, gang violence scars sporting, emancipated, half-brother of mysterious beauty Veronica Jones - Lodge is not a surname it’s safe to throw around in New York - is a very different experience to anything school offered him on either side of Riverdale’s tracks. In the first week he has the numbers of not one but two cheerleaders thrust into his hand and gets called ‘bro’ more times than he can count without being overcome with nausea.

 

“You gonna join the team?” a cheerleader who he thinks might be called Cassie, but could just as easily be Claire, asks when he’s waiting in the gym for Veronica, who, as expected, landed immediately at the top of their new school’s pyramid.

 

“No, I’m just waiting for my sister,” he gives Cassie a look from under his lashes that he hopes will be unfriendly enough to make her leave him alone. “Sport isn’t really my thing.”

 

His best glower seems have the exact opposite of the desired effect on the girl who bites her lip in response and wraps her platinum coloured hair around her finger coyly. “What is your thing?”

 

“I write,” he says, his tone dismissive, in the hope she’ll take the hint and leave him alone. “I’m more school paper that school spirit.”

 

Even that admission doesn’t drive her or her friend, who materialises at her shoulder and he thinks now might actually be Cassie, away. He may have had only one girlfriend in his life but even he’s not inexperienced enough to not realise that they’re flirting with him. He feels sweat prickle on the back of his neck and scrubs at it self-consciously. When Veronica finishes her conversation with one of the other girls he rushes to her side with unseemly haste. “Ready to go?”

 

“It’s the fucking Twilight Zone V,” he complains as they make their way home. “Cassie kept touching my arm for God’s sake.”

 

“Well you shouldn’t have been smouldering at her like that. What’s the poor girl supposed to think?” Veronica’s far too amused by his discomfort, smirking, and fizzing under the surface with barely suppressed mirth. “I can set you guys up on a date if you like.”

 

“Christ, don’t you fucking dare.”

 

“Jughead,” her slender arm slips through his as they walk, in that platonic old-fashioned way they do in period dramas and her gaze drifts around the street as she speaks. “Being this resistant to the advances of a hot, and clearly easy, cheerleader is weird. You do know that, right?”

 

“If being weird means I don’t get set up with a predatory bimbo with whom I have no more in common than a pulse then, fine,” he looks down into Veronica’s amused cat like eyes. “I’m weird.”

 

Veronica laughs and he finds himself chuckling faintly along with her and tucking her arm closer into his side.

 

They arrive back home to the sight of an irritated delivery guy rapping on their door. “Delivery for Jones?”

 

“Yes,” Veronica strides forward and while signing the delivery slip glances over her shoulder impatiently. “Well come on Jughead.”

 

He lugs boxes from the side-walk up the stairs - because naturally in a dive like this the lift doesn’t work - to their apartment while Veronica waits - because naturally she doesn’t help - in the lounge looking like a cat with the cream. “What the hell is all this Veronica?”

 

“This, Jughead, is next month’s rent and more,” she opens one of the boxes with a flourish and pulls a sequinned dress from inside. “I transferred everything to storage before we left and had it shipped here once we settled. There’s a small fortune in couture dresses, designer shoes, and trinkets form Tiffany’s in here.”

 

“V,” he protests the wrongness of Veronica, who was always nothing if not a queen, being reduced to pawning off her possessions. “You shouldn’t have to sell you things.”

 

“They’re just things,” she retorts, her movements becoming faintly jerky as she folds the dress with less care than its price tag probably deserves and stuffs it back in the box. “In fact, they’re things bought with my father’s blood money. I don’t want to keep anything from him.”

 

“V,” he tips his head and fishes for her elusive gaze. “Hey, it’s okay to want to keep things, memories. Even if your dad let you down, it’s okay to want things that meant something-“

 

“It’s not. I don’t want any reminders of him,” her voice is a blade forged from glass, sharp and brittle. Fierce and fragile in a way that ignites a protective ache in his chest

 

“I know he did some awful things,” despite always having considered Veronica the most decisive person he’s ever met he can’t help but try and dissuade her. Probably because he feels so guilty that half the money she’d get for them will go to keeping a roof over his head. “But he’s your dad.”

 

“I don’t care,” she insists with a hard set to her jaw and a lightening flash of anger in her eyes warning him to back off _right now_. “I’ll never forgiven him for what he did. He’s not my father, not after that.”

 

“You feel that way now-”

 

“He tried to have you killed,” her voice runs hot and loud before cooling fast, cracking as it does into a fractured whisper. “ _You,_ Jughead _._ There’s no coming back from that. Not ever.”

 

He’s rendered speechless by her words, and the tears forming in her steel and velvet gaze. Was he the line she’d drawn in the sand? The one that, once crossed, would expunge every last drop of love she had for her father? There must be something to say he think. Some way to express the magnitude of what her confession means to him. But whatever the right words might be they’ve gone into hiding and he can’t find a single one of them.

 

Veronica brushes away her barely formed tears with sharp business-like movements. “Right. Stack these in my room. I know a place uptown we can start trading them at the weekend.”

 

Obeying simply because he can’t think of anything else to do, he piles the boxes up in the corner of her room. Whe he’s done she’s looking as composed as ever in front of his laptop, their laptop as it’s become, browsing some social media site he daren't glance at just in case he catches a glimpse of Riverdale and the people they left behind there.

 

His own social media accounts, already barely active, were deleted before he even left home. She notices his furtive gaze avoiding her screen and turns it more fully towards him. Revealing a profile picture of Veronica wearing the scarlet colours of their new school’s cheer squad and the name Veronica Jones in bold black letters.

 

“Brand new account,” she says with a small understanding smile. “Ooh look Cassie slid right into my DM,” she gives him an exaggeratedly shocked look. “What can she want?”

 

He shakes his head, the feigned irritation in his sigh unable to cover the warmth that rises in his eyes when her gaze reaches out to dance with his. “I have a feeling I don’t wanna know.”

 

“Hmm,” Veronica makes a production of scanning the message. “Hey Veronica, yada yada, your brother is soooo hot, blah blah, date, blah, bl-”

 

“Not happening, ever!” he cuts her off and Veronica laughs with a wicked delight perfectly suited to her dark feline features.

 

“Okay Friar Jones, have it your way,” she closes the laptop and stretches elegantly, the action pulling her top tight over her breasts in a way that makes him feel like the furthest thing from a monk. “What’s for dinner? I’m famished”

 

Mercifully he manages to get his eyes back on her face before she notices they strayed. “Pasta do?”

 

“Perfect.”

 

Later he studies himself in the bathroom mirror wondering what the hell a pretty girl like Cassie, let alone a rare beauty like Veronica, could possibly see in him. His hair maybe, he thinks, finger combing it over to one side. Veronica’d mentioned not wearing his beanie in the same context as calling him a smoke show. His hair’s okay he supposes, and if Veronica thinks he’s hot and so does Cassie, and even Toni once upon a time, then maybe he’s better looking than he realises. In all honesty though, when he looks in the mirror, he still sees the pointy nose and shadowed eyes of a face only Betty Cooper could love.

 

At the weekend Veronica picks out some prime items from her newly delivered riches and loads him up with bags like a pack pony.  They board the subway and head across the city to a neighbourhood where there’s actually a market for designer dresses and expensive jewellery. Outside a jeweller in Manhatten she clutches the box in which sits the string of pearls her father gifted her in a white knuckled grip.

 

“Veronica,” he says softly and she startles as if she’d forgotten he was there. “You don’t have to do this. Not yet anyway. Who’d have thought shoes could be worth so much money, we’re good for weeks”

 

“I want to Jughead,” she insists, the strong set of her shoulders belied by the little girl trembling behind her eyes. “I just want to get it over with.”

 

Impulsively he takes the box from her, “Fine, okay, but you don’t have to do it,” there’s a pleading in his voice, begging her to let him protect her from this small pain. “Let me.”

 

Her gaze is a peculiar mix of offence and gratitude. “Go on,” he encourages. “Go blow some cash on an over-priced coffee,” he nods to a hip café on the other side of the street. “Let me do this for you. Please.”

 

Inside he asks the jeweller if it’s possible for him to keep just one pearl. “Sentimental reasons,” he explains and the man nods his understanding before deftly snipping the string on which the pearls hang and handing him a single opaque sphere. He secures the tiny treasure in the zipped inner pocket of his jacket and heads back to Veronica $1000 richer. “They cost ten times that,” Veronica gripes as they head home and he thinks her expression is a little lighter than before. Perhaps those pearls had always been an albatross about her neck.

 

He’s shed his own burdens too in New York. He hadn’t realised how the contrary expectations of Riverdale’s two sides had weighed on him. How much sheer effort it took every day to reconcile what the north remembered of him and what the south expected.

 

Here things are simpler. The only two people with whom he willing spends time are Veronica and, occasionally, Missy, their copacetic neighbour whose door is always open and whose elfin smile is always bright and easy when she runs into him on the stairs and invites him over for coffee.

 

The ghosts that haunt him are more diaphanous than he feared they would be. The ever-present heartache duller than he could have expected, and he finds himself only rarely chasing flashes of gold and red down the dark treacherous paths of his own mind,

 

He thinks perhaps this, like so much else in his life recently, might be entirely thanks to Veronica.

 

Veronica is a terrible flat mate on a multitude of levels. She’s messy, she’s noisy in the mornings, and she hogs the shower. She never deigns to cook, vacuum, or, god forbid, wash up.

 

“Christ V,” he finds himself snapping often. “If you use the last of the god damn milk buy some more or at least let me know so I can.”

 

“Sorry,” she always replies, as if this is the first time. “Won’t happen again.”

 

But Veronica is also the very best flat mate he could have right now. Her unrelenting sense of entitlement is a constant cause of irritation distracting enough to keep his mind in the moment, present in New York pointing out once again that he is _‘not the fucking help Veronica’,_ instead of drifting northward to Riverdale and Betty and the questions that could so easily infiltrate his mind. What’s she doing? Is she happy? Does she, and he hates himself for this one the most, miss him at all?

 

Veronica is also, in her own unique way, unflinchingly on his side. She works tirelessly, subtly, to make his life easier. At school she burns bright and dazzling, casting a shadow he thinks designed specifically for him to hide in. When his mood falls into melancholia she’s there with outrageous comments on the shows and movies they watch that has him quickly embroiled in heated arguments that usually go on just long enough to pull him from his funk before she’ll shrug and acquiesce as if she’d been indifferent all along.

 

As the weeks go by, and the temperature begins to drop, he finds himself unable to deny three things about Veronica Lodge that surprise him.

 

Firstly, and he cuts himself some slack for not realising earlier on this one because it’s so unlikely, poverty suits Veronica. Who could have predicted that the spoilt princess he’d wrongly dismissed as a shallow daddy’s girl would look as at home working through their tight household budget as she had sipping mimosas in her family’s penthouse?

 

She sells two designer dresses and a pair of heels and buys an entire wardrobe from Primark in which she still manages to look as classically stunning as ever. He’d got a few items out of that shopping trip too. She’d returned with two pairs of black jeans, a multi-pack of grey t-shirts, and a thick flannel shirt. “Far be it from me,” she’d said earnestly when he’d looked at her questioningly. “To undermine a man’s chosen aesthetic, no matter how misguided.”

 

He hadn’t been surprised that everything fitted perfectly, Veronica was just good at that sort of thing. She’s good at almost every sort of thing. He doesn’t even attempt to manage his own money, he simply hands his pay-cheques over to Veronica who somehow manages to pay their bills and ensure there’s always enough money in the tin by the TV for him to do their weekly shop on Wednesday nights when the comic store is closed but she still has to go to work.

 

Jughead’s no stranger to making meagre funds go far and keeping the grocery bill down is a point of pride with him. If he’s frugal and buys the cheap coffee he can usually keep enough aside to get one of the barely drinkable bottles of rosé she likes to open on a Saturday night when they slump down together on the couch and watch TV so bad he grinds his teeth and counts down the minutes till she inevitably falls asleep and he can find something that doesn’t involve crying models or crying celebrities or anybody crying who hasn’t been shot or run through with a samurai sword. Its distressing how long its been since he watched a good Tarentino film.

 

The second thing, and this he’d hoped not to be so aware of, Veronica is a woman. He’d known that of course. That she was a woman, and a beautiful one at that, but the Veronica he’d known in Riverdale had carried an aura of unreality about her. He’d never have called her fake, Veronica was always one hundred percent, genuinely, herself, but she had always seemed impossibly well put together. Groomed to a level of perfection that robbed her in some way of her individual womanhood.

 

Here that veneer falls away. The Veronica with whom he shares a flat. Who sits opposite him at the counter that separates the kitchen and lounge every morning sipping coffee and wearing cotton pyjamas and no make-up, is pretty in a way her Riverdale self could never have achieved.

 

She makes the short, if increasingly chilly, journey from the bathroom to her bedroom every morning wrapped in a towel, her shoulders, still clinging to the last blush of a summer tan, bare and damp. One evening, late for work, she dashes across the lounge to grab her uniform from the airer near the radiator in her underwear and only a blind man would be able to deny that she is, objectively, extremely attractive.

 

He acknowledges, grudgingly and obviously never out loud, that she is the sort of gorgeous that doesn’t usually step down from the glossy pages of fashion magazines to mingle with the likes of him.

 

Thirdly, perhaps most unlikely of all, she not only knows when his birthday is, a surprise in itself, but also exactly how to handle it. The day passes with perfect anonymity and he thinks as he walks into their flat after work that unacknowledged birthdays might be the best thing about running away from home.

 

Inside he’s surprised to see Veronica unpacking burgers and fries onto plates in the kitchen. Take out is beyond their budget after all and he’d been planning to make a spaghetti carbonara because he knows she loves Italian.

 

“Hey?” he greets questioningly and she turns half towards him before the ping of the microwave draws her attention.

 

“Sit,” she orders as she pours freshly cooked popcorn into a bowl and brings it over along with his burger.

 

“I don’t have red hair,” she tells him with a nostalgic half smile when he looks at her speculatively. “Or broad shoulders. And this isn’t the Bijou,” she nods to his laptop which has Netflix already open. “Feliz cumpleaños, Torombolo.” 

 

He hates his birthday, the very mention of it has put him in a funk now for years. Even his annual Bijou tradition was more about appeasing Archie than anything else. But right there and then, perhaps because he’s so far from home, the fact that she’d not only remembered, but also done exactly as little as he’d like makes his chest feel tight and his throat clogged.

 

“Thanks V,” he curses his voice for sounding decidedly choked. “I, er,-”

 

She shushes him without looking his way as she sets Inglorious Bastards to play. “Quiet. The movie’s starting.”

 

 


	4. Too comfortable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little over a week later he wonders if perhaps he’d become too comfortable in New York. In those autumn days as school went on, as school inevitably does, filled with mind numbing lessons and trivial teenage drama. With Cassie’s flirtatious tenacity and Veronica’s ever-expanding social circle grating on his nerves. Comfortable with Missy’s easy camaraderie when he spends the evening’s that Veronica’s out, drinking her not-quite-as-bad-as-their’s coffee and proof reading her college essays.
> 
> Too comfortable, not to mention too busy, being pretty much Veronica’s butler to find himself too often wallowing in his heartbreak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always for the lovely comments and to everyone who clicked the kudos heart

Veronica doesn’t notice him immediately when one night in mid-autumn he slips in through the door of their flat to find her in the living room counting out steps. Her movements are small, far from the flamboyant wiggling and leaping he’s used to seeing while he waits for her at practice or at games. She counts rhythm and shuffles around the small space in the lounge occasionally substituting words for moves.

 

“Three, four,” she moves one foot out to the left then the other back, lands her hands on her hips and does a subtle sort of undulation through her torso that’s somehow far sexier than the booty shaking extravagances of the pre-game show. “five, six, and,” she stops moving and talks through the next few moves. “cartwheel, splits, shake, shake, and one, two” he watches, silent and fascinated, as she begins moving again until, after a dozen more counts, some kind of spin brings her to a stop facing him.

 

“Christ,” her hand flies to her chest. “Jesus Jughead. Lurk much?”

 

“Sorry V,” released from the grasp of her hypnotic movements he pulls off his beanie and throws it aside. It’s a habit he’s been indulging in more frequently these days and her gaze, as usual, flicks upwards to his hair with a small but familiar flash of admiration that is absolutely _not_ the reason he’s been wearing it less and less around the flat. “Continue.”

 

“No, I’m done,” she wipes a fine layer of sweat from her forehead and he acknowledges one more thing he never credited her with. Veronica works hard. She makes everything in life appear so easy, from love, to school, to cheer leading. He’d always just assumed it was in some way purchased. That her successes were a product of her wealth and not her dedication.

 

Betty always openly toiled at everything, pushing above and beyond, visibly going the extra mile. Veronica appeared, by comparison, to breeze through life, untroubled and undeserving.

 

He realises now how unfair that was. How her effortlessness had always been, in fact, a product of so much effort. He almost wants to apologise, but his regret isn’t tangible enough to articulate. Although he suspects if he told her he’d misjudged her in Riverdale and that he’s sorry, she’d understand.

 

He wanders into the kitchen and starts chopping onions for the Bolognese he’s planned for tonight’s dinner and she leans against the counter beside him drinking tap water and complains about the school’s cheer captain.

 

“Cheryl may have been an evil conniving narcissist but at least she had ambition,” she concludes with a huff. “Anyway, how was work?” her eyes twinkle with the wicked teasing he’s grown used to recently. “Anything exciting happen?”

 

He stops chopping and gives her an accusing look. “Jesus Veronica. Was that you?”

 

Humour makes her eyes sparkle like dark gems and she hides a smug little smile behind her glass. “I don’t know what you mean.”

 

“Sure, you don’t,” his annoyed tone poorly conceals the truth; that he’d endure all her teasing games for the puckish joy in her gaze. “Cassie and her cronies probably stumbled on the store because they just love comics.”

 

“I imagine the visit cemented your colleagues’ opinion of you as - what was it they said when I came in?” she pauses, making a show of trying to remember. “A ‘chic magnet’.”

 

“Christ, probably,” he pushes the onions into the pan and they give a gratifying sizzle. “They had their uniforms on and Cassie kept leaning over the counter to talk to me. Richie may have to get his eyes surgically re-inserted and I dread to think what Scott will do with the visual later.”

 

“Ew,” she shudders. “He is so pervy.”

 

“He is and he really liked you,” he points his knife at her and raises his eyebrows as they fall into the playful back and forth that’s become their norm since leaving Riverdale, and the external factors that charged their interactions with genuine animosity, namely the civil war between their families, behind. “Maybe I’ll mention where _you_ work. See how you like it.”

 

“Not equivalent. Scott is magnificently gross and Cassie’s is super cute, also, totally harmless,” she counters and when he turns around to drop the chopping board in the sink she takes a clove of garlic from the worktop and tosses at the side of his head.

 

“Hey,” he spins round and flicks bubbles off his hands in retribution, making her squeak in protest.

 

Something in the rare girlish sound makes him grin and he scoops up a large handful of bubbles and mushes them into the side of her face. She screeches in surprise and tries to make an escape. But he’s quicker, snaking an arm around her waist and pulling her back towards the sink. She warm and light and still a little damp with sweat as he lifts her off the floor with one arm and grabs a handful of bubbles with the other.

 

“Jughead!” she squeals and squirms out of his grip. Escaping just in time for the bubbles to miss their mark and slide to the floor. She ducks under his arm and spins round his back so she can reach for a handful of her own.

 

She hits him full in the face, her little hand grinding against his cheekbone as she smears the soapy payload across his cheek and over his mouth. He tastes soap suds and, underneath, the salt of her sweat.

 

“Right!” he grabs a huge handful of bubbles and she takes flight, dashing into the living room with a screech and putting the sofa between them.

 

“Jughead no,” she gasps through her laughter as they face each other across the sofa both bouncing on the balls of their feet, ready for the other to move.

 

He feints left, and when she moves goes the other way and over the arm, grabbing her around the waist again so that they tumble together onto the sofa with her back against his front as he smears bubbles into her neck. She’s squealing and squirming like an eel in his grip and he’s, for the first time in he doesn’t know how long, laughing and giddy as a child.

 

“Uncle, uncle,” she cries and they both relax, her body going limp on top of him as her laughter fades.

 

Even with all her weight on him she’s light as a feather. She feels tiny and girlish against him in a way he never associates with the indomitable woman who’s five-inch heels clicked into his life last year. Suddenly he’s far too aware of the curve of her arse against her lower abs and the softness of her skin where his hand lies just a few inches up inside her top.

 

The skin beneath his fingers is warm and without thinking he strokes it softly with his thumb. The action makes her already limp body seem to melt further into his and she makes a tiny humming sound in her throat.

 

_Move!_ He orders himself. Lying there with his flatmate languidly reclined on top of him, her soft skin in his hand and her pert arse almost in his lap is a very, very, bad idea. Yet there’s a part of him, touch starved perhaps, that doesn’t want to relinquish the heat of her body against his or the sound of her breath hitching in her throat when his other hand, which had been lying against her shoulder, moves fractionally upwards till it finds the fluttering pulse in her neck.

 

When his cock starts to harden in his jeans, dangerously near to where Veronica might notice, the mental demand to g _et the fuck off this couch_ takes on a shrill hysterical voice in his head as he feels his world tilt violently on its axis.

 

Veronica squirms off him and straightens her clothes. There’s no trace of embarrassment on her face and he thinks he must have imagined the way she’d sunk into him. Her sighs whispering something intimate and wanting into the air.

 

“Come on,” she orders, her voice steady in a way he’s certain his would not be right now, and offers her hand to pull him up. “No lying about now Bartleby. Dinner isn’t going to cook itself.”

 

“And you’re not going to cook it either I’m guessing,” he retorts, his snarky tone a convenient cover for the strangeness he can feel in his throat. The out-of-placeness that threatens to make his voice squeak unpredictably the way poor Dilton Doiley’s did all through middle school.

 

She disappears to the shower without bothering to answer and he finishes dinner with the radio turned up loud enough to drown out the sound of the running water. By the time she re-emerges, damp haired and fresh faced, like a pyjama clad water nymph, he’s got the Bolognese simmering gently and the kitchen spotless from the way he’s channelled his nervousness into action.

 

“It’ll be another half an hour,” he tells her unnecessarily in the hope that filling the silence will make him less aware of the unsettling reaction of his body to the feel of her against him and the mental images he couldn’t block out as easily as the sound of the shower.

 

“Ok,” she replies distractedly as she sinks down into the couch and reaches for her copy of their AP English text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and starts to read.

 

He fishes his own copy from his bag, perches beside her and – wishing, for the first time since moving in, that there was a chair so he didn’t have to be so close beside her - tries to do the same. But his world is listing and swaying like a boat in a high, lazy, swell and he keeps reading the same line over and over.

_Christ,_ he thinks. What the hell is wrong with him? It was nothing. Barely a moment’s contact. And he doesn’t want Veronica that way. Despite her beauty. Despite the scorching heat of her fiery temperate and the alluring whip-crack sting of her wit. Despite that she wants, or at least had once wanted, him. He has never thought of her that way.

 

Why the hell does this feel so awkward now? he wonders. And, more importantly, is she experiencing the same seasick sensation of discomfort? She’s certainly not swallowing as often as he is. Why the fuck can’t he stop swallowing? The back and forward in his head is so disorienting that the words on the page swim in response and he’s staring unseeingly at them when her book hits the coffee table with a thump and she lets out a loud frustrated groan.

 

She turns to him and he’s struck with a heart hammering dread that she’s going to go right ahead and address the elephant in the room like the emotionally fearless badass she is.

 

“That,” she declares, pointing accusingly at the book in his hands. “Is utterly unreadable. Why the hell couldn’t we have been doing Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights? I mean, everyone loves a Byronic anti-hero right?”

 

“It’s ok,” he answers feebly, his whirring mind lurching to a sudden nauseating stop at the realisation that for her there is no elephant, no awkwardness, no unfamiliar tension in the air. There is just her and her flat mate doing their homework.

 

The realisation makes him feel less emotionally off-kilter and, when Veronica decides that it is just a waste of effort for them to both read it and he should simply read aloud, he feels his world easily regain its equilibrium as he delivers an automatic rebuff. “Do your own reading Veronica, that’s the point of the class.”

 

“Don’t be mean Torombolo,” she protests in the tone of someone who has absolutely no doubt they’ll get their way. “You’re better at this stream of consciousness bull than I am. Besides people like their audio books read by the author, it’ll be good practice”

 

He gives her a look that he hopes conveys how unimpressed he is by her transparent attempts at manipulation and she smirks unrepentantly in response.

 

“Fine, but I’m not writing your essay, so don’t even think it.”

 

Veronica responds with a wide-eyed innocent look as if the thought would never occur to her and he starts at the top of the page he’s on.

 

“ _I’d like to see you. He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself.”_

 

“I’m not there yet,” she interrupts as she wiggles into the couch, getting comfortable. “Just go back to the start”

 

“Seriously Veronica?”

 

She lays her head on the back of the couch and looks at him expectantly without speaking and the urge he has to roll his eyes feels as safe and familiar as pulling on his beanie.

 

He reads twenty pages before dinner and finishes the ludicrously long first chapter after. By the time he’s finished they’re both leaning against opposite arms of the sofa with her feet pressed lightly against his thigh, which he’s relieved to say has no effect on him, and he can’t imagine being more relaxed or comfortable.

 

A little over a week later he wonders if perhaps he’d become too comfortable in New York. In those autumn days as school went on, as school inevitably does, filled with mind numbing lessons and trivial teenage drama. With Cassie’s flirtatious tenacity and Veronica’s ever-expanding social circle grating on his nerves. Comfortable with Missy’s easy camaraderie when he spends the evening’s that Veronica’s out drinking her not-quite-as-bad-as-their’s coffee and proof reading her college essays.

 

Far too comfortable tilling up comics and cementing his reputation with his colleagues by charming the older women who pass through with their young sons, and whose smiles verge on predatory as they hand over crisp unfolded twenties. Large tips and fingers lingering against his palm, as they thank him for steering their little darlings towards something with at least a little artistic merit.

 

Comfortable taking those tips, and the long way home, to the little bakery a few blocks over. Where he can buy Veronica the cupcakes that meet her ridiculously lofty standards and watch her eyes flutter shut as she savours every bite.

 

Too comfortable, not to mention too busy, being pretty much Veronica’s butler to find himself too often wallowing in the heartbreak that usually hits him only in the moments between bidding an exhausted goodnight to his flatmate and succumbing to the sort of dreamless sleep that blesses those whose days are long and whose troubles are few.

 

Being, busy, tired, and virtually never alone, is enough to protect him almost entirely from a dive in to melancholic introspection. There is quite literally no time in his life to brood. Until, on one Friday night, when the autumn feels a little like winter, Veronica takes an extra shift at the coffee shop and Missy isn’t in when he rings her doorbell.

 

He stares at his laptop and considers opening a word document and jotting some of the phrases and scenes he composes in his head but rarely finds time, between school, work, and hanging with Veronica, to put to paper. But he’s tired so instead he decides to trawl his browsing history for an article about The Cleveland Strangler that he’d been wanting to read.

 

His browsing history has however become deeply entangled with Veronica’s. Who, he realises as he scrolls through it, has not shunned the past as fully as he has.

 

His leg bounces rapidly, making the screen wobble in response, as he stares at the address of an Instagram account whose name he thinks he barely knew back home; _Riverbabes_.

 

_Don’t fucking do it,_ he orders himself moments before he clicks the link and starts scrolling through the pictures. Cheryl dominates of course, with Toni coming in a close second - it’s clear who manages the account - but Betty’s there. In the group shots and in the videos of the them cheering on the Bulldogs. She's there, with her bright blonde ponytail bouncing and her big bright smile, looking so perfect and happy. So very much the same. That he has to believe that his leaving changed absolutely nothing for Betty Cooper after all. There’s a video of Archie scoring a touchdown which pans to the Vixen’s whooping and waving their pompoms. Betty jumps on the spot and cheers her heart out and Jughead decides to open Veronica’s wine without her.

 

By the time Veronica gets home, soaked to the skin from the dash through the rain from the bus stop, he’s drunk the entire bottle and has fallen well and truly down a social media rabbit hole.

 

“Oh my God,” she sighs with a mixture of annoyance and sympathy as she closes the laptop. “Not healthy Jughead.”

 

Irritation, irrational and unjust, spikes in his already bloodied chest. “Not really your business Veronica.”

 

“When my friends spiral, I consider it my business,” her voice is matter of fact and the sentiment is one he’d appreciate if he weren’t drunk, and miserable, and honest to God fucking angry. Angry at Betty, and at Archie. Angry that their lives seem to have gone on so perfectly without him.

 

It’s petty, he knows, to wish them anything but the joy he left so they could find. Yet he can’t vanquish the taste of bile in his throat and the sucking pit of jealousy in his gut. He can’t force himself to be the man he wants to be. He’s not selfless and magnanimous, he’s bitter and twisted up with envy and spite.

 

He hates himself almost as much as he hates them right now. Mean, nasty, little man that he is, lashing out at the only target in range. “We’re not friends Veronica,” he snarls as he stands and rounds on her. “We’re just a sad pair of fuck ups making do with this shitty little life because the people we love don’t love us back.”

 

Dark eyes flare momentarily. But Veronica keeps her expression hard and her voice stern. “Jughead-”

 

There’s regret pulsing somewhere in the back of his mind, but it’s barely noticeable beneath the alcohol sodden torrent of self-loathing and self-pity drenching his thoughts like the autumn downpour she’s just made it home through. “Christ, I don’t know which one of us is more pathetic, me or you,” even as he says it, he knows its him. Even now, with her hair plastered to her face and her make-up smudged by the rain. With the blade of his rejection forced once again between her ribs, she exudes composure and strength. She is indomitable, and he hates her for it. 

 

He steps closer, hungry for reaction. “You are sensational Veronica. You’re smart and beautiful and totally fucking unstoppable. You could have been anything, but you’re stuck here in this crap hole because you’ve convinced yourself you’re in love with me. Like you have any fucking clue what that actually means.”

 

She slams down the portcullises in her fortress of her gaze. “Whatever Jughead,” she snaps, bridges drawn up, defences readied. “I’m going to my room. I have precisely no patience for your melodramatics right now.”

 

“No, you stay,” he snarls. All the anger he feels at himself, and at Betty, finding its target in the tiny crack in her armour that has his name scratched along its edge. “I’ll go. I need another drink.”

 

He says it to get a rise out of her. He thinks perhaps he wants her to stop him. To warn him to be careful not to provoke his father’s demons. Perhaps he wants her to comfort him, to tell him that Betty hasn’t forgotten him and that her happiness is a beautiful gift only he could have given her.

 

But he’s pushed her too far tonight and she’s locked down tight inside her smooth indifferent shell. She gives him a cold look and heads to her room.

 

“Fuck,” he hisses, grabs his fake ID and cash from the tin, and heads to the nearest bar.

 

Hours later he bangs awkwardly into the frame of Veronica’s bedroom door, making the pictures on the wall shake and startling her awake.

 

“Jesus! Oh my god Jughead,” she gasps, sitting up and pulling her bedclothes around her. “What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an intruder.”

 

He takes a step forward and, overcompensating for slight list of his body to the right, ends up stumbling left so his knee hits her bed. “I wanted to say something.”

 

“Can it wait till morning Jughead? I’m tired and I’m not very happy with you right now”

 

“’M sorry” he slurs slightly and perhaps she’s right and this should wait for morning and sobriety, but he doesn’t want to go to bed with her angry with him. He can’t bear for her to wake up thinking the worst of him. “Please V, it’s important.”

 

He sits on the edge of his bed and she recoils from the reek of his breath. “God, Jughead how drunk are you?”

 

“Veronica, just listen, I need to tell you something, please.”

 

She crosses her arms and he’s struck by how she still somehow appears fierce, even sitting up in her bed with her cotton pyjamas and her tousled hair. “Fine, get it over with so I can get some sleep.”

 

“V,” the room spins and he shuts his eyes briefly in response, only to be hit with the sensation of rushing backwards. Opening them, he feels himself surge back into the room and his stomach churns, its sucking turbulence pulling the words back down his throat, giving the silence around them time to thicken with tension.

 

“I’m happy,” he says softly when he’s sure he’s not going to throw up. “Here, in New York. In my job. At school fending off Cassie. I’m happy in this freezing cold flat, making meals for a few dollars a day and scamming free wi-fi. I’m happy here, even with the shit reality TV and the empty milk bottles in the fridge.”

 

She lifts an eyebrow when he pauses and he’s certain the dredged silt feeling in his gut is a direct result of her unimpressed stare. “You do everything ‘ronica,” he continues feeling distinctly like he’s not making any sense. “You gave up so much and I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful, that I’m not happy here, with you,” he stops, feeling the sour liquor he drank earlier churn in his stomach as he’s hit with a potent surge of reflux he can barely swallow down.

 

His head spins and his limbs go so heavy that her bed feels like quicksand pulling him down. He lies down next to her and lets his weight sink into the mattress. “With you,’ he repeats, slurring and barely audible. “’m happy”

 

“Oh my god, get off,” he doesn’t respond to the push she gives him in the shoulder, he’s a drunk dead weight against her mattress. An unpleasant and immovable intrusion in her space.

 

“Forgive me,” he murmurs and tugs at her waist, pulling her down next to him. He needs to hear her say that she’s not mad. That she’ll be here tomorrow when he wakes up hung over and ashamed. That she won’t be angry with him. He needs, in his drunken state, her to not be angry with him with irrational intensity.

 

 “Please V, I’m sorry, it’s not shitty here. I’m a dick. I shouldn’t have said any of that. You’re not pathetic, you’re amazing, and clever, and you work hard, and you smell,” he nuzzles into her side, “Really nice.” He blinks, vaguely aware his thought process may have derailed. “I’m happy.”

 

His leaden muscle sink deeper into her mattress and his eyelids fall shut in relieved exhaustion. “Jughead?” Veronica snaps and gives him a rough shake that makes him moan in complaint. “Are you going to sleep here? Jesus Jughead,” she gripes as he mumbles an affirmative, but she pulls her comforter up over him anyway, her movements more tender than her words. “Fine, just don’t puke on me ok.”

 

“Happy,” he mumbles again as he falls asleep still clinging to her waist.

 

The next day he’s almost one hundred percent certain that he dreamt her fingers running soothingly through his hair and her soft voice in the gloom. “Yeah, me too Jughead.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, you didn't think this was gonna be angst free did ya? :-)


	5. An accord

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “V please,” he’s certain he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness but he’ll beg for it anyway because the alternative, losing her, losing this life they’ve built, is unthinkable. “I was an arsehole. Please, let me make it up to you. Anything, whatever you want, just tell me what to do.”
> 
> Her expression when she turns to look at him is calculating. The fatigue in her gaze giving way to the spark and steel of the natural business woman she is. “Ok Jones, make your offer.”
> 
> A transaction then, how very Lodge of her. 
> 
> “Foot rub,” he blurts out, the words somehow ahead of the idea. “I’ll trade you, I don’t know, three foot rubs a week for as long as you want if you’ll forgive me”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Urgh sorry this has taken so long. Somehow it wouldn't move from almost finished to actually finished. It's very late and I'm posting which might be unwise (another proof would be better) please forgive the inevitable typos and grammar boo boos

Jughead is woken before eight the next morning by a rough shake to the shoulder. The crusted seal of sleep across his lids cracks as he forces open his eyes to the sight of a perfectly made up Veronica Lodge, glass of water in her hand, looking down at him with unadulterated disgust.

 

He groans at the assaulting brightness of the light coming in through the curtains - which Veronica no doubt opened out of justifiable spite - and she arches an eyebrow in haughty disdain at his pitiful state. “Drink this,” she places the glass on the bedside table followed by a pair of painkillers. “And take these. You’ve got work in an hour”

 

He tries to speak, but there’s acid churning in his stomach and dehydration squeezing the inside of his skull and he can’t manage more than a noise in his throat that’s halfway between a groan and a whimper.

 

“Self-induced Jughead,” Veronica declares, without a flicker of sympathy. “I have to go to work, but I am going to call you every five minutes until I know you’re up. I mean it.”

 

“Christ,” he sits up slowly and reaches for the pills. Fumbling slightly as he tries to pick them off the smooth surface with stiff clumsy fingers. 

 

Veronica takes in his slightly more upright position, eyes narrowing as if she’s calculating the odds he’ll lie straight back down when she leaves and go back to sleep. “Jughead,” she warns when his eyes droop.

 

“Ok, ok” with a herculean effort he pushes himself up so he can swing his legs off the bed and immediately drops his head in his hands as nausea washes over him in a sickening wave. How, he wonders, did his father put up with this utter awfulness every morning for at least a decade?

 

One more appraising look and Veronica seems satisfied and turns briskly on her heel. “V,” he stops her before she escapes the room. “About last night, I’m-”

 

“Don’t worry about it,” she interrupts, her tone sharp and her jaw set as she leaves him to his hangover, and the rising tide of guilt that only swells higher with every memory of the night before that breaks the surface of the sticky sluggish river in his mind.

 

There’s a game that afternoon after her shift at the coffee shop and rather than going along to watch her as usual he’s determined to use the time to find some way to make it up to her. He has no money to replace her wine, or treat her to take out, after he blew half their weekly budget drowning his sorrows. So, he decides to cook pasta for dinner, which he knows she prefers to his ubiquitous vegetable soup, and scrounges the ingredients, and a little help, from Missy to bake a batch of apology cookies on which he attempts to pen the words _I’m sorry._

It turns out thatdecorating cookies is yet another thing that Betty made look easy that is in fact nearly impossible. So, when Missy laughs at his illegible attempt at lettering, he resorts to drawing crooked faces in a number of different emoji moods on each one that he arranges into story of anger, penitence and eventual happiness he hopes will amuse Veronica enough to earn him a softening in her righteous anger.

 

“Veronica’s lucky,” Missy tells him as they assess the gift together. “My brother would never bake me cookies.”

 

Being half-siblings is part of their cover story and at school he’s fine with the lie. But Missy is quickly becoming his friend and he wants to tell her that Veronica is not in any way his sister. She’s is, in the absence of Betty and Archie, his best friend. She’s his saviour and the only reason he didn’t drown weeks ago. The moniker Veronica Jones is too small for her. She’s bigger and better than that and he wants Missy to know it.

 

He shrugs one shoulder, biting back the impulse to come clean. “Thanks for the help. An unrelenting stream of mockery always brings out my creative side.”

 

Missy laughs and bumps her hip against his. “Anytime, Mr Jones,” she smiles and he returns it distractedly as he moves to leave. Veronica will be home soon and he wants to get his apology ambush set up.

 

“Send that essay over once you’re done and I’ll proof it for you,” he offers as she walks him needlessly to the door.

 

“You’re a lifesaver,” she tells him warmly and her dark mahogany eyes crinkle at the corners. He likes Missy, she’s bright and friendly and always seems pleased to see him. It’s good to know he’s actually capable of making friends. He’d worried that away from Riverdale, and the safety net of Betty and Archie, he might not have it in him. But Missy always makes time when he wants to hang out and she always smiles when she sees him and laughs at his jokes, so he figures he must be nailing this new friendship.

 

He winks as he leaves, his mind already returning to Veronica and how to get her to forgive him.

 

She’s later home than he’d calculated she would be and the irrational fear that she’s left him has him pacing the living room anxiously, beanie tossed aside and hair messed by his jittery hands, while dinner sits drying out in the oven.

 

By the time she pushes open the door he’s on the sofa, head in hands, running worst case scenarios through his head like a movie reel.

 

“V, Jesus,” he stands abruptly when she finally enters. “Where the fuck have you been?”

 

Veronica doesn’t answer as she hangs her coat up behind the door. Her dark eyes are cool and inscrutable and she makes no snide rejoiner. Wouldn’t it be so easy, so obvious, to say, ‘ _living my shitty life_ ’ or _‘why would you care?’_ or even a well-deserved ‘ _fuck you’_? He’s fairly certain that’s exactly what he’d do in her shoes. But she’s always been classier than him, and besides her haughty silence is far more effective in shaming him than any words she could say.

 

“I’m sorry, Veronica, I didn’t mean that. I just-, I was worried,” he tries for a crooked smile that’s supposed to be charming but feels strained and ugly on his mouth. “I was starting to think you’d been murdered in that shady ally off 5th”

 

“I’m fine,” she tells him without emotion and he feels his fingers flex with tension.

 

“Right, ok,” all his rehearsed speeches die in his mouth. “I’ll get dinner.”

 

She doesn’t bother changing out of the ugly blue and yellow uniform she’s usually in such a hurry to discard. “Polyester is not kind to the skin Jughead”, she’d told him once. “Besides, these colours do not flatter my complexion. He remembers thinking at the time that she was pulling off the sky and corn just as gorgeously as she everything else she wore. Tonight he thinks the soft nursery colours might clash with her dark guarded eyes and rigid spine as she sits stiffly on the sofa while her serves her dried out linguine which she accepts with a clipped ‘thanks’ and no eye contact.

 

When she takes her plate to the sink, she eyes the cookies on the counter coldly and he feels like a fool.

 

“Veronica, about last night-”

 

Cracks run over her cool exterior in a spider’s web of subtle tells. Her gaze flickers, her jaw tightens, and her voice simmers with contained threat as she tries again to dismiss his half-formed apology. “Forget it Jughead.”

 

“’Ronica,” he trails after her, acutely aware of how much he must resemble a whipped dog right now. “Listen-“

 

“No Jughead,” the spider’s web shatters so suddenly he imagines he hears it like the sound of shattered mirror in his mind. “You listen.”

 

She rounds on him and he realises now how hard she’s been holding on to her temper, how close to the surface the wild-fire of her temperament has been burning all along. “I get it. You lost Betty and Archie. But guess what Jughead? So did I.”

 

He steps a fraction back as she takes a menacing step towards him, eyes brimming with angry tears, and gestures with her arm as if in the direction of their lost friends and lovers. “They don’t miss us,” she fires the brutal truth at him and her despairing gaze tells him how hard the recoil hits her. “They don’t miss us and it sucks!”

 

With a trembling hand she reaches for where her pearls once lay across her clavicle and rubs harshly at the bare skin. “But that’s what we signed up for when we got on your bike back in Riverdale,” she pauses and her chest heaves with emotion. “What I did not sign up for is the bullshit you pulled last night.”

 

He opens his mouth but doesn’t get a chance to respond before she lifts her chin and steadies her gaze. “Veronica Lodge is no one’s punching bag Jughead”

 

There’s a lump of guilt and shame stuck somewhere in the back of his throat and he has to swallow hard before he trusts his voice. Even then it comes out choked. “`I know V, I know, I’m sorry. For everything. Shit, you deserve so much better than how I treated you last night. And than this crap excuse for an apology,” he gestures vaguely at the cookies. “I want-“

 

“Let’s just forget it Jughead,” in the wake of her outburst she sounds exhausted and defensive and her gaze has taken on a tired and resentful acceptance that reminds him, sickeningly, of how his mother used to look at his father.

 

His heart thunders and his stomach swirls with the dread and regret. What if she leaves him? What if he’s screwed up so badly that she actually leaves him? His hands shake as he runs them through his hair. “I know I fucked up and-“

 

“Just drop it ok,” she moves away and perches elegantly on one of the high stools at the breakfast bar, her fatigue poorly hidden by the proud tilt of her chin.

 

“V please,” he’s certain he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness but he’ll beg for it anyway because the alternative, losing her, losing this life they’ve built, is unthinkable. “I was an arsehole. Please, let me make it up to you. Anything, whatever you want, just tell me what to do.”

 

Her expression when she turns to look at him is calculating. The fatigue in her gaze giving way to the spark and steel of the natural business woman she is. “Ok Jones, make your offer.”

 

A transaction then, how very Lodge of her. He wracks his brain for anything he can offer her. He already does pretty much all the household chores. He could offer to do her laundry but he’s fairly certain there might be more to washing her clothes than his own bundle of denim and cotton thrown in together on a warm wash every Thursday night.

 

He could write her essays, but she’s as smart as he is, she doesn’t need his help. He realises with a sinking sense of defeat that he truly has nothing to offer her. She lifts an eyebrow at his silence and leans down to pull off her heels. Her feet flex in relief and he thinks for the hundredth time that her footwear is ill-chosen for work in a coffee shop.

 

“Foot rub,” he blurts out, the words somehow ahead of the idea. “I’ll trade you, I don’t know, three foot rubs a week for as long as you want if you’ll forgive me”

 

She tips her head, considering his offer with a look that’s unnervingly reminiscent of her father, and he shifts his weight from foot to foot under her scrutiny. “Four,” she counters. “And I’ll _consider_ forgiving you.”

 

 “Absolutely.,” he breaths out in a rush of relief. “Anything.”

 

She slips lithely from the stool and holds out her hand. “Then we have and accord”

 

There'd been a time, not long ago, but hazy now in his memory, when he’d considered the ways she speaks to be an irritating affectation. Lately, without knowing when his opinion changed, he finds he enjoys the way her phrasing could come from Teen Vogue one minute and Jane Austin the next. How slick and supple her vocabulary can be.

 

Without thinking, swept up perhaps in relief and the elegance of her slender hand extended towards him, he takes it and draws it to his lips, laying a kiss across her knuckles as if in homage.

 

Something uncertain flutters, sparrow-like, across her face and she draws back her hand away sharply and moves to sit on the couch. She turns and leans back against the arm, expectantly lifting her feet one by one onto the seat with the grace of a dancer and a diva’s entitlement. “And bring me those cookies.”

 

He places them on the coffee table and settles besides her as she selects one and turns on the laptop. Her foot feels warm and dainty in his lap as he begins to work her sole with his thumbs through the fine material of her stockings, the pressure drawing approving noises from her throat that send a flush crawling up the back of his neck.

 

Eventually she speaks. “These taste better than they look,” she says, and it feels like a truce. “Which is fortunate because they look like the bastard offspring of Eric Cartman and Pennywise”

 

He chuckles. “Missy said the same thing. Minus the imaginative parentage”

 

“Missy?” she asks in a tone so neutral that he suddenly feels like he’s done something wrong again.

 

“Er, yeah, seems I needed help even for an offering this tragic,” he doesn’t understand why he’s suddenly wants to justify himself but the words are tumbling out before he can analyse it. “Besides we didn’t have any sugar and she did. Also, her oven isn’t as temperamental, so, yeah”.

 

“I see,” she answers with her eyes on the laptop’s screen. “So, I assume you still haven’t told her you’re a high school junior then.”

 

The slight bite in her tone makes him defensive. “I thought we were keeping our status as unaccompanied minors a secret Veronica.”

 

When she turns towards him, he thinks he must have imagined the tightening of her jaw and the acid in her voice. “Of course,” her gaze is bland and relaxed and her shrug elegant and breezy. “And why are you hogging her anyway? I am sorely in need of more female company.”

 

She wiggles her foot prompting him to continue his work and he shrugs off the strangeness of the exchange in favour of committing to memory the points and pressure that make her sigh with approval.

 

Somehow the agreed four foot rubs a week becomes one nightly. He doesn’t complain. It’s a small price to pay to have her still the corner stone of his life. Still moving away from the school’s it crowd to sit with him at lunch. Still allowing him to wait for her at cheer practice, although he’s unsure why he regularly subjects himself to the indignity of Cassie’s unrelenting advances or the spectacle of Veronica accepting the fawning attention of the school’s various flavours of jocks with regal condescension as if it were her birth right.

 

He’d gladly rub her feet three times a day if it keeps him on team Jeronica, as she’d called them once to his chagrin, and not adrift in New York without her help and support. On Thursday, already five foot rubs in for the week. They return home from school to find the flat unusually and uncomfortably warm.

 

“Fuck,” Veronica hisses. “I left the blower on.” She flicks the switch on the small electric heater that they use now and then to warm their chilly feet.

 

“Crap,” he mutters. They both know a full day of the electric element heating their empty flat is something they simply can’t afford. Veronica looks stricken so he tries to console her. “Hey V, no worries, yeah. We get one really toasty night, then we’ll just have to turn down the heating till pay day. We’ll manage”

 

“It’s already freezing Jughead,”

 

“Well then we’ll wear extra sweaters and bring our comforters through to the couch,” she’s frowning hard and shaking her head, so he takes her slight shoulders in his hands. “Hey, we’ll manage. Go on, get changed I’ll make omelettes.”

 

After they eat, she sits dejectedly beside him in a pair of the short silk pyjamas she hasn’t worn since the autumn turned their poorly insulated flat into an ice box they can barely afford to heat, and for once doesn’t place her little feet expectantly in his lap.

 

“Hey,” he bumps her shoulder with his and gives her a strained half smile. Back in Riverdale when he’d catch the tell-tale signs of a Betty Cooper spiral he’d always known what to say. The right words to comfort her, the right pressure on her tense shoulders to calm her racing mind. But with Veronica. Formidable, unflappable, Veronica Lodge he can’t think of a single thing to say or do to comfort her other than force a strained smile onto his lips and pat his lap in invitation. “Come on.”

 

Her feet, he muses as he works his fingers over them, are as complex and contradictory as the woman herself.

 

The skin over their tops is so silky he feels embarrassed by the calloused roughness of his hands. This is Park Avenue Veronica, haughty and untouchable.

 

Her toenails are painted with inexpensive polish and neatly filed. This is the Veronica that has emerged in New York, the one that still manages to be groomed and perfect even without the pedicures and expensive products she once lavished on herself.

 

The soles are rough and hardened from the long pre-school jogs he had no idea she took and the height of the heels she never fails to wear. This is the Veronica he still finds intimidating, the one that works her ass of and makes it look easy. Who doesn’t back down from anything.

 

Lastly, and he would never tell her this because he actually values his life, her ankles are swollen from long hours on her feet serving coffee. This is the Veronica he respects the most. The one who faces challenges head on and gets shit done without complaint. The one who isn’t too good to serve coffee and collect tips from people whose monthly income would once not have paid for her purse. This is the girl he’s ashamed to have ever considered a snob. He wonders as he massages her ankle, working the puffiness away with the flats of his hand, if this is the Veronica who once claimed to be in love with him.

 

It’s an unsettling thought and one he’s refused to allow himself in all their time in New York. Her feelings for him, confessed months ago in a that hospital room with the lights low and morphine buzzing dully in his mind, feel like a place he cannot enter. A minefield surrounded by coiling barbed wire and littered with warning signs. _Danger,_ he sees them in his mind, red letters on rain bleached wood, _keep out._

 

 

Distracted by his wandering mind and the force with which he has to resist the question of if she still feels that way, his slips higher than he’d intended. Roving firmly over the base of her calf and drawing from her a scarcely audible moan.

 

She’s moaned before when he’s massaged her feet. Hamming up her pleasure with a long encouraging groan or a dramatic ‘soooo good’ as he presses his thumbs into the sole. This moan is different. This is a sound she tries to shackle but cannot. A low, secret, sound, not of satisfaction but, perhaps, of want.

 

He watches her profile as his hands travel back downward, the pressure turning light as he runs his fingertips over the smooth skin of her ankle. She doesn’t look away from the screen of his laptop, where some trash he thinks might be Love Island plays, as his hand strokes back up the inside of her calf with only just enough pressure that it could still be called a massage and not a caress.

 

There’s a voice in his head telling him to stop right now. But there’s also a part of him that won’t be silenced, demanding to know if she still feels the way she said she did back in Riverdale. That, now he’s let the thought in, needs to know if she still wants what he never could get his head around her wanting in the first place.

 

She seems engrossed in the show, her profile still and unreadable and he decides he’s letting his imagination run away with him. She looks utterly unaffected by his touch, not even so much as an undulation of her elegant throat, as if all he is now is her friend and intellectual sparring partner, her personal cook and part time masseur. He shouldn’t be disappointed, tells himself firmly that he is not disappointed, that this is good for their friendship. Good for the affectionate camaraderie that has blossomed in New York into something he thinks they both value.

 

But as he pushes his hand more firmly along her calf, his eyes catch on the subtle parting of her knees. A small but seemingly deliberate, couldn’t possibly be deliberate, movement, that makes his mouth instantly dry and his already racing heart frantic in his chest.

 

_Don’t fucking do it_ , a sane part of his brain orders uselessly as some larger, stupider, part, enslaved to the feel of her skin and the subtle eroticism in that tiny movement, directs his hand higher. He smooths his palm over the inside of her knee, his fingertips just brushing the impossibly silky skin of her lower thigh.

 

Sanity makes a final push for control demanding he stop this _right fucking now_ before he ruins the most important, only important, friendship in his life. His hand stills on her knee trapped between that sobering thought and the, heart racing, cock hardening, feel of her hot smooth skin beneath his fingers.

 

His eyes trail from his own paralysed hand along the exquisite line of her thigh and up over the plum coloured silk that clings to the curve of her hips and the captivating swell of her breast before finally settling on the carved stone of her profile.

 

He swallows roughly and, ignoring the tightening of his jeans, returns his hands to her feet. Acutely aware that she makes no subtly whine of disappointment nor does she even look away from the screen. He feels like an idiot.

 

That night as he lies in bed the image of her shapely legs falling open, wider in his fantasy than in reality, gets stuck in his brain and he can’t help the reaction of his body to the image. He prides himself on being an intellectual being rather than a sexual one smugly holding Archie in slight contempt for his over-active libido.

 

In the months he’s been in New York he’s only taken matters into his own hands now and then. Mechanically jerking off in the shower studiously avoiding giving the vaguely feminine shape behind his eyes any distinguishing features. Just in case it somehow morphs into Betty and he finds himself pathetically tugging himself off to images of his lost love.

 

But tonight, there’s no denying the pressure built up low in his belly, nor the identity of the woman he conjures as he wraps his hand around his insistent erection. He feels like a creep. Veronica is his flat mate, his best friend, and his rock. She deserves better than this kind of objectification. But somehow even the imagined sexual tension of the evening, sitting beside her with his hands safely back in his own lap and his breathing uncomfortably loud, was enough to get him horny as hell and he has to do something about it or he’ll get no sleep tonight.

 

So, he strokes himself and pictures a scenario where, in that moment of indecision with his hand frozen on her thigh, she’d turned her enigmatic gaze on his and slowly, deliberately, without releasing his eyes, opened her legs wider.

 

He imagines sliding his hands past her knee and up her thigh, the satin skin almost real against his empty hand. Silk, cool over the back of his hand. Lace, hot and damp under his fingers.

 

Her name, breathy and uncertain, on his lips. His, permission and demand, on hers.

 

He bites his lip to keep from making a sound as he strokes himself with firm steady strokes and imagines a slimmer hand moving over his cock. The house is silent and his breath seems almost loud enough to travel through the wall to wake her. In the distance a siren wails and out in the street someone shouts. In the silence of his room he hears Veronica whispering his name as she tugs him up to lie between her open legs. In the darkness he sees her clearly as she lifts her head to kiss him, making them both moan.

 

A quiet guttural grunt escapes him as he imagines the feel of her eager mouth on his and her greedy hands tugging him closer. “Come here” she whispers in his mind and reaches down to guide him inside.

 

His hand moves smooth and fast over his cock as he imagines his hands finding her full hips to steady her so he can thrust inside. _Veronica_ his mind supplies and he hears his own name echoing back at him in her hoarse, lust filled, voice. He’s so close, his body simmering on the edge of release he just needs the right thought, the right image, the right word inside his mind to get him there. _Veronica, Veronica, Veronica,_ he repeats her name, over and over in his head until he’s coming all over his own stomach in a moment of rare and all-consuming euphoria.

 

In the aftermath with cum on his hand and belly cooling fast to something cloying and disgusting he feels shabby and disrespectful. How the hell is he going to face her in the morning? He was supposed to be different, better than this.  Turns out he’s just another creep joining the ranks of horny boys wanking themselves dry over Veronica Lodge.

 

The next morning though after a broken night’s sleep he finds himself sufficiently tired and grumpy that acting naturally comes surprisingly naturally and the awkwardness he’d imagined he’d feel after the vivid fantasy he’d indulged in during the night fails to materialise. Instead he stands beside her near the coffee maker and lays his head on the cupboard with a groan of “coffee” that makes her laugh and poor him a cup of bitter black nectar.

 

“Hey,” he says when the caffeine makes him feel lucid enough to need to fill the silence. “Any objection to curry for dinner? I’m trying to expand my repertoire”

 

“Actually,” she looks away, busying herself adding sugar to her coffee. “I’m going out tonight. I have a date.”

 

It really shouldn’t surprise him. Veronica has been turning down offers since the moment they arrived in New York, but he’s still stunned into an ineloquent, “oh” in response, and, against his better judgement, an equally inarticulate, “who?”

 

“I’m not sure you know him,” she says taking a sip from her chipped mug. “He’s on the basketball team. You’ve probably seen him around though he has a,” she pauses, looking vaguely embarrassed in a way that’s unusual for her. “Distinctive jacket.”

 

“Stars and stripes?” he blurts out, the pitch of his voice rising with incredulity. “Seriously?”

 

She narrows her eyes and her lips tighten with annoyance. “His name is Brad.”

 

“Of course it is,” he fires back in a voice he’d hoped would be teasing but comes out unmistakably disdainful, making her prickle.

 

“You’re hardly in a position to judge anyone for their name Forsythe,” she snaps.

 

At this point he realises he should absolutely end this conversation with something magnanimous. A simple, ‘have fun’ would do or, better still, a heartfelt, ‘that’s great V’. It’s surely what a half decent friend would do.

 

He’s not really certain why instead he levels her with a scornful glare. “And where is _Brad_ taking you Veronica?  Let me guess. Bowling? Monster trucks? NRA shooting range? Or are you just gonna hang out and sing the national anthem?”

 

“He’s taking me to dinner actually. Christ, what is your problem Jughead?”

 

“Nothing,” he’s aware he sounds sullen and ungracious. “Just figured since every jock at school wants to date you, you might have picked a boyfriend in at least one AP class”

 

“Who said anything about a boyfriend?” her scowl is deep and her annoyance obvious. “He’s a nice guy and I haven’t been taken out and spoiled in forever. I’m not sure why you feel the need to be such a colossal dick about it.”

 

He grunts in response. He’s not sure about that either.  Not sure why he’s suddenly wishing he had enough money to spoil her with more than the occasional cupcake and bottle of vinegary wine. Certainly not sure why he’s prickling with jealousy at the thought of Brad buying her dinner and making her feel pampered in a way the budget meals he cooks her never can, no matter how much effort he puts into tailoring them to her liking.

 

Turns out you jerk off over a girl once and you turn into a possessive dick.

 

“Sorry V,” he mumbles, reminding himself that he’s supposed to be getting her back onside after being such a little bitch on Saturday, not driving her further away. “You know I’m an asshole before the coffee kicks in. You deserve a nice night.”

 

She regards him coldly, the seconds under her gaze ticking into unease before she nods and turns away. “Thank you Jughead.”

 


	6. Circa Pretty Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He finds himself, as the week moves on, in no hurry for the arrival of their monthly pay cheques, and with it a return of a little heat in their flat. Not when the cold nights are all the excuse they need come together on the couch under a single duvet with her cold little feet trapped between his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh guys I am so sorry the stook so long. I don't even know why. I just kept opening the document and staring at it. Urgh
> 
> Anyway I pushed through, for better or for worse and at least it's longish, although you should maybe judge if that's good thing

They take the bus to school as they usually do now that the weather’s turned cold. He misses her climbing onto his bike behind him. Misses her arms wrapping around his waist as they’d weave through the morning traffic. Misses, if he’s honest, the looks they used to receive when he’d kill the engine in the parking lot at school and she’d step lithely off the bike and shake out her hair.

 

They’d been a mystery then. Beautiful, enigmatic, Veronica and her scary brother. With the ugly scar on his arm and the crowned twin headed snake – the tattoo his father had insisted Toni give him before he left Riverdale; “you might need the serpents one day boy”- rumoured to curl across his ribs.

 

He’s done nothing to dispel the rumours that he’s dangerous. He rarely carries a knife, he certainly never carries a gun, but he doesn’t mind the jocks and bullies thinking that he might. He spent too many years a victim back in Riverdale and he’s damned if he’ll be one here, especially not in front of Veronica.

 

They talk about the Chemistry homework due that day. About the book he’s reading that he’s pretty sure she’d love, and the new coffee machine half her co-workers can’t figure out that’s driving her crazy. He makes her laugh and she makes him smile and neither one of them mentions her upcoming date with Brad.

 

At school the jock is waiting by Veronica’s locker with his honest to fuck American flag jacket and a bright boyish smile. “Hey Ronnie,” he greets and Jughead slinks a few strides away to his locker and pretends not to watch Veronica gift the corn-fed blonde a coquettish smile as she assures him that they’re still on for their date and touches his arm flirtatiously.

 

Jughead shoves his books roughly in his locker and, when Veronica’s called away by a friend from the cheer-leading squad, fixes Brad with a dark threatening look that turns the boy’s open smile into something more nervous.

 

“Hey man. You’re Jughead right?” Brad shifts from foot to foot. “I’m Brad.”

 

“Sure,” Jughead prowls a little closer. He knows he should stay out of this and yet he finds himself reaching back across the miles to the Southside. Drawing out snakes to coil in his muscles and hiss behind his eyes. “Taking my sister out?”

 

“Er, yeah,” Brad says with a huff of nervous laughter and a placating lift of his hand. “Hey man I get it. I got a sister too. I swear I’ll be gentleman.”

 

“You better,” Jughead gaze hardens with emphasis. “Or we’re gonna have a problem.”

 

“Absolutely dude,” Brad relaxes a little and nods, clearly relieved that this is a demand he’s already planning to fulfil. He’s probably a good guy, Jughead thinks resentfully, cut from the same wholesome cloth as Archie Andrews. “I think she’s great man. I’ve been asking her out on the regular since she started going here. Couldn’t believe my luck when she finally said yes after the game.”

 

Everything slots into place in Jughead’s mind. One of those moment of sudden, fully formed, understanding that usually give the sleuth in him a sense of such satisfaction, but today makes his stomach plummet sickeningly. “Saturday?”

 

“Yeah, dunno what changed her mind,” Brad laughs a little self-consciously. “We didn’t even win.”

 

Saturday. The day after he’d thrown a petulant drunken fit over a few pictures of Betty and in the process derided and belittled Veronica and the everything they’ve built here together. The morning after he’d stumbled drunkenly into her bed reeking of cheap beer and desperation and pleading for forgiveness.

 

Saturday. The day she gave up on him? The day the scales fell from her eyes and she realised she had always been far too good for him, whatever her heart had once told her?

 

_Shit!_

 

He stalks off without acknowledging Brad’s words and spends the day sulking and avoiding Veronica.

 

Back at home he pretends not to watch her getting ready. Pretends that he doesn’t notice that she’s dug out one of the few dresses she hasn’t yet had to trade and that it hugs her figure perfectly. Pretends that he hasn’t noticed the way the light glimmers in her newly straightened hair or how her painted lips press together as she checks her makeup in the living room mirror. Pretends, to himself, that he’s not thinking about how beautiful she is, how demonstrably out of his league she is.

 

He knows he might have come across as jealous earlier and if Brad tells her that he basically threatened him at school he’s gonna be in the dog house again for sure. He can’t afford to anger her, any more than he can risk her knowing that he’s been looking at the curve of her perfect ass in that tight dress. So, deciding he needs to seem entirely ok with her date, he over compensates and asks if she wants him to make himself scarce later. “Oh my God, Jughead, on a first date? Really?”

 

“Sorry,” he thoroughly sick of that word and the regularity with which he’s found himself saying it recently. “I just thought-”

 

He trails off at her raised eyebrows. _Just thought what?_ she seems to ask. T _hat I’m a slut?_

 

He presses his lips together to hold another apology prisoner inside his mouth and nods. “Right, ok,” he manages eventually. “Have fun, you, er, look,” his words knock awkwardly against each other in his throat and come out in a humiliatingly stilted rhythm. “You look nice.”

 

After she leaves he decides to see if Missy’s in. Because sitting alone in a cold flat counting the hours till Veronica comes home sounds utterly depressing and more than a little tragic. For a brief, spiteful, moment he considered taking Veronica’s wine over, but the thought of disappointing her sits ill in his stomach, so he grabs a couple of beers and a bag of chips and knocks on Missy’s door.

 

“Er hang on,” Missy calls through the door once she’s spied him through the peephole. “Just a minute.”

 

He hears her scurrying about behind the door and when it opens she’s tying a brightly coloured scarf around her corkscrew curls.  “Hey.” she greets with a warm smile as she lets him in. “Free night?”

 

“Veronica has a date,” he grumbles as he flops down on her couch.

 

“Oooh,” Missy sits beside him and draws her feet up under her. “Big brother doesn’t approve?”

 

He shrugs. “Bland all-American jock. Harmless enough I guess, I’m just honestly not sure what she sees in him. I may have acted like a bit of a jerk.”

 

“Oh Jug,” she chides and leans her head back on the couch. “You shouldn’t judge. You wouldn’t want Veronica looking down her nose at your girlfriends, would you?”

 

He snorts. “Yeah, I think that’s a pretty moot point.”

 

“Why?” she asks, a small frown marring the smooth copper skin of her forehead.

 

Normally he’d shrug the question off, but he’s had a shit week, and the warmth in Missy’s eyes, the gentle question in her voice break him and it’s all just tumbling out.  He tells her about loving one girl since the age of ten. About that girl and the boy that she loved more. About how he and Veronica were always going to be casualties in the predestined story of the girl and boy next door.

 

Her eyes glisten a little as he tells her about homelessness and alcoholism, gangs and violence and abandonment. About the boy he’d called his brother and the way he’d kissed the girl who held his heart. “In their defence it seemed pretty likely I was gonna die,” he laughs, a brittle humourless laugh. “Wasn’t fair on V though.”

 

“Wow,” Missy leans in and places her hand on his leg. “That’s sucky,” her lower lip tugs downwards at one side. “And kinda incestuous.”

 

He lays his head back on the sofa and looks at her. “Yeah. Archie, Betty, and Veronica were my family. Guess that’s why I’m bummed about this date. Veronica’s all I have left.”

 

“You won’t lose her because she’s dating, Jughead. I mean, you wouldn’t abandon her if,” Missy pauses and bites her full, unpainted, lip. “If you were dating, would you?”

 

“Of course not,” his smile is rueful and self-deprecating. “Although like I said, moot. There’s not much of a market for goods this damaged.”

 

She opens her mouth to speak but he beats her to it. “Christ, it’s getting late,” he stands up and rolls his shoulders. “I wanna be home when Veronica gets back, just in case,” he shrugs, he’s supposed to be Veronica’s brother after all, he can hardly tell Missy that he wants to be there to run interference if Veronica changes her mind and decides she wants to bring Brad up for a night cap. “You know.”

 

“You’re a good brother Jug,” Missy tells him as she walks him to the door. “And I’m sorry,” she catches his arm as he’s halfway out. “That life’s been so tough on you,” suddenly he’s enveloped in a tight hug, her thin arms wrapping around his shoulders as she pulls herself up on tiptoes to bury her face in his neck and whisper, “goodnight,” into his ear.

 

He pulls away a little self-consciously, he’s not much of a hugger these days, and notices Veronica tugging Brad into an enthusiastic kiss at their door. The jock’s hands wrap low around her back, in a way that makes Jughead grind his teeth, as he pulls Veronica close.

 

Missy gives him a sympathetic, if amused, look and retreats into her apartment leaving him waiting awkwardly for the couple to separate so he can get past them.

 

“Sorry Jug,” Veronica says with a coy, kittenish, laugh he’s certain is precisely one hundred percent fake. “I didn’t see you there.”

 

“Night then Ronnie,” Brad says pulling back with an adoring smile for the beauty in his arms. “See you at the game tomorrow.”

 

“Can’t wait,” Veronica’s smile is warm honey and cold white teeth.

 

“See ya bro,” Brad salutes him as he leaves and damn if the boy doesn’t look like he’s had the best night of his life as he walks back the last few steps to the stairwell to catch a glimpse of Veronica before he goes.

 

He disappears and Veronica’s façade falls as she turns to face Jughead with a raised eyebrow. “Evening at Missy’s?”

 

“Yeah,” he shrugs, determined to appear casual despite the mass of negative emotions tangling in his mind like the unravelled ball of twine that lived in the draw at Fred’s house for years, constantly knotting with the pens and small tools and making the retrieval of radiator key an ongoing battle. “She can actually afford to turn on her heating, so,” he shrugs. “Did you have fun?”

 

They enter the apartment and she takes off her coat as she answers. “It was certainly a rare treat to eat in a restaurant.”

 

“Nice break from my cooking huh?” He curses the vulnerability in the question and in his oh so forced smile.

 

“The appetizers were delicious but the Carbonara,” she drops her voice as if sharing a scandalous secret. “Skimped on the bacon.”

 

He makes an outraged noise and thinks, not for the first time, that her easy humour is a gift from heaven. “For shame!”

 

She smiles briefly then shivers dramatically, “Christ, it’s freezing.”

 

“Yeah we should probably retreat to out beds,” he suggests reluctantly. “Or I guess we could bring our duvets through and finish watching that copy of Game of Thrones Richie gave me. We are woefully far behind and avoiding spoilers at the comic book store is getting damn near impossible.”

 

She hesitates and he only realises he’s been holding his breath when his lungs empty in relief at her quiet.  “Ok.”

 

He makes them hot chocolate and when he’s done she’s already snuggled under her duvet, lifting the corner in invitation. He hesitates. Getting under a duvet with Veronica while his mind is continually running off in less than platonic directions seems like a very bad idea. “Come on Jughead,” she rolls her eyes with an obvious irritation that’s calming in its normality. “Until we can afford to turn the heating back on we may need to share a little body heat. Your white boy heritage might suit sub-zero temperatures but this Latina is going to turn to into a popsicle.”

 

“I thought you styled yourself the ice queen Veronica,” he observes as he settles beside her and she tucks the duvet around then. “This should be your element.”

 

For an answer she presses her foot against his making him yelp in surprise, “cold enough for you?”

 

“Jesus Veronica,” he complains as he tucks her foot between his to warm it. “Keep your corpse like chill to yourself.”

 

He finds himself, as the week moves on, in no hurry for the arrival of their monthly pay cheques, and with it a return of a little heat in their flat. Not when the cold nights are all the excuse they need come together on the couch under a single duvet with her cold little feet trapped between his.

 

Every night they sit a little closer together. The few inches of space that had separated them on that first evening eroded away, night by night, until her side is pressed against his and their thighs touch all the way down to the knee where their lower legs tangle together.

 

He’d like to think that the contact is welcome only because being physically close to her eases the fears that have been bubbling in him lately. That she’ll leave him soon. That either he’ll fuck up too badly or Brad, or some equally perfect all-American boy, will somehow steal her away from this dime store life and back to the bright lights she’s always deserved.

 

But he’s self-aware enough to realise that he’s as weak for the feel of a beautiful woman snuggled into his side as any other teenage boy. When she pushes closer seeking his warmth – “so this is where all those calories go” she’d observed that first night, “you’re like a radiator Jughead” – he draws her in with an arm around her shoulder and, despite how much he might judge himself for it, acknowledges he doesn’t have to have be in love with a girl to want to press her hot, tight, little body against his own.

 

On Friday night, both tired from long shifts at work, they watch an action film he thinks they each hate equally but neither can be bothered turning off. Mercifully, his tiredness allows him, for the first time since he let himself acknowledge how sexy she is, to sit beside her in comfortable silence without doing battle with the voice in his head asking him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing getting horny for his flat mate.

 

His guard slips and his sleepy unfocused mind is slow to realise that their feet are moving over and under each other. A rhythmic slide of sole over skin, one then the other, in an unconscious rhythm that suddenly becomes very much the focus of his thoughts.

 

How long, he wonders, have they been doing it? Does she even realise that their feet are slip sliding over each other’s in and oddly intimate caress? The film, that he’d barely been watching anyway, blurs to background noise as his own breathing fills his ears. Is it faster than usual? Louder? Has she noticed?

 

His hand drops, he’d claim by accident as he snaps into wakefulness, slipping from her shoulder to lie low on her ribs and a moment later she readjusts her position, slumping deeper into the couch, so that his hand is a little higher, a little closer to the curve of her breast. She’s tired, he tells himself, she’s just getting comfy, because she’ll be asleep in a minute as usual. But his brain won’t listen to reason and his hand has designs of its own, flattening against her cotton pyjamas so the tip of his thumb lies just an inch or two beneath her tits, which he’d love to deny he’d noticed earlier were braless beneath her sleep shirt.

 

The film is having a rare quiet moment and in the almost silence he hears her swallow then she shifts again, lifting the arm that was between them to tuck her hair behind her ear. When she lets it fall back down it lies against his leg, her knuckles pressing lightly into his upper thigh.

 

His body freezes, going numb all over, so that all feeling is concentrated in that tiny spot where the back of her hand lies against his leg. He imagines heat that can’t possibly be radiating from her knuckles seeping into his skin through the thick material of his sweats. Christ what the fuck is wrong with him? It’s barely contact. It’s Veronica. Veronica who he’s long since made it clear he’s not interested in romantically, who, maybe, sort of, has a boyfriend, though what she can possibly see in fucking Brad he can’t imagine.

 

Her index finger moves back and forth, the knuckle brushing against his leg and his heart starts hitting the inside of his ribs in a fast and arrhythmical tattoo. Pumping his blood, low and needy, in his body.

 

Feeling rushes back again, making him aware of how she’s pressed against him, how he can count the ribs beneath the hand splayed across her side. Her finger moves again and he’s suddenly extremely aware of his hardening cock and how little his sweat pants will do to hide it.

 

He’s still telling himself, despite rising evidence to the contrary, that he doesn’t think of Veronica that way, when his thumb starts playing copycat, mirroring the back and forth of her finger against his leg, the crest of each movement bringing his thumb dangerously close to the underside of her breast.

 

It shouldn’t be erotic, these stiff, awkward, caresses. But he thinks he hears her breath quicken and his own picks up in response and it all feels at once terrifyingly intense and, in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering light of his laptop screen, utterly unreal. As if in the stillness of the night no normal rules apply and anything is possible.

 

Her middle finger joins her index finger and, emboldened, he shifts his hand an inch higher so his thumb enters the borderland where innocent ribs give way to the rising swell of soft sinful breast. Her breath hitches, there’s no mistaking it this time, it catches audibly in her throat and he’s instantly and profoundly fucked.

 

Before he can stop himself he’s run his hand higher so that his thumb and first finger bracket her breast and she lets out a small soft moan that goes straight to his now fully hard cock just as her other hand reaches, with no pretence now of casual accidental touch, to skim fingers along the waistband of his sweats. The action turns her body more fully into his and it’s so natural then to cup her breast and drop his head into the crook of her neck that he barely second guesses the action at all as he finds his mouth pressed, unmoving, to her throat.

 

If this is happening, and he fucking hopes it is now because she smells amazing and her breast feels small and pert in his hand, the nipple eagerly pebbled through her shirt. The light weight of it a contrast to Betty’s full heavy tits but no less perfect for fitting entirely in his hand.

 

Her hand is moving now, away from his waist and up over his shirt to explore his chest. Shit, he thinks, half trepidation, half eagerness, as she tips her head to give his mouth better access to the delicate column of her throat, this is definitely happening.

 

He pushes her back gently onto the couch and nudges her legs apart so he can move between them. His weight held on his knees and free hand because it seems a little soon to be grinding his hard-on into her cotton covered pussy no matter how much he’d love to explore that friction.

 

It seems she’s seeking that same pressure, her hands come to grasp his shoulders and her body undulates beneath him in a rhythmic quest for contact that makes him feel more desirable than he thought possible. He lifts his head and takes in the cock hardening sight of her hooded eyes before bringing his mouth down to meet her panting parted lips. She jerks her head to the side a second before his kiss falls on her mouth and he’s suddenly spiralling into self-doubt.

 

“Shit,” he gasps drawing back sharply. He’s that guy, he thinks in horror, that horny teenage douchebag who reads consent where there is none because he’s so focused on getting his dick wet he doesn’t stop to fucking ask. “Shit, I’m sorry.”  

 

Her hands catch him by the hair before he can scramble off her and one slender leg hooks over his to trap him. “No Jughead,” her voice is hoarse but sure. “I want this.”

 

He feels himself frown. It’s official; he has no fucking clue when it comes to reading woman.

 

“It’s just,” Veronica begins then stops and grimaces awkwardly. “I have some embarrassingly romantic ideas about kissing, ok, that’s all.”

 

Still this makes no sense and his dumb jealous mind goes straight to some bitter notion of it not being fair.  “You were kissing stars and stripes in the hallway a week ago.”

 

Her answering scowl is irritated and impatient, her go to expression when she’s dealing with him, and it settles him in a way that only her annoyance could. “About kissing you, Jughead” she clarifies, obviously irked at having to explain something so obvious. “I want this,” she repeats impatiently. “Just no kissing, ok.”

 

No, he thinks, no that’s not really ok at all.

 

That emphasis, ‘ _you_ Jughead’, holds in it a certainty he’s not sure now why he’s been unsure of. Looking back at how she’s taken care of him in New York. How she’s forgiven him when he’s been bratty little a shit. How she’s held his eyes in the moments after he’s made her laugh. It seems so obvious. In the light of all that, how had he actually managed to forget, ignore, or perhap more accurately simply deny, that she still feels for him? Perhaps even, though this thought makes him feel like a toddler trying to work a round brick through a star shaped hole, still loves him.

 

“Veronica,” he murmurs and strains gently at her restraining hands. “We don’t have to.”

 

She tugs him back to her. “Jees Jughead,” she snaps. “I said I want this,” she reaches between them and squeezes his cock through his sweats in a blatant attempt to derail his objections. “Just think Julia Roberts circa Pretty woman ok.”

 

The part of him that wants to say no and protect her heart for what must surely be a mistake caves easily. Overruled by the part of him that has never doubted she knows her own mind tag teaming with the growing part of him that really wants to know how she’d feel around his cock.

 

“Ok,” he whispers hoarsely and she responds by slipping her hand inside his boxers and wrapping her slender fingers around his dick. “Christ,” he hisses in appreciation and drops his head back to her neck. “Can I kiss your, body?” he asks against her jawline in a breathy, broken, voice. “Your neck?”

 

“Yes,” she gasps hotly and her hand stills on his cock as she tilts her head for him. “God, yes.”

 

He lavishes her neck and shoulder with open mouthed kisses that make her groan and push at his sweats trying to get them off. His hand goes back to her chest desperate to feel her tits bare in his hands. But the buttons are small and fiddly, and his fingers are clumsy with lust and impatience, and he can’t get the fucking things undone. He gives up and shoves her top up, groaning in pleasure as he finally gets the soft mound of hot flesh in his hand. “Fuck.”

 

She’s lifts her foot, warmed by the way he’d cradled and stroked it with his own, up between them to hook over his waistband so she can shove his pants all the way down to his ankles. Once they’re off she pushes him off her just enough so she can wriggle out of her own pyjama bottoms before pulling him down again between her spread thighs.

 

When his dick bumps against her wet pussy she lets out an unladylike grunt and grinds up against him, mashing her slippery warmth against him and making him swear. “Holy fuck, Veronica”

 

He wants to tell her to slow down, to wait till they at least have their tops off, but she’s angling herself so the head of his cock catches in her entrance and sinking into her is beyond resisting.

 

“Fuck,” it’s her turn to swear mindlessly as he slips inside her. She feels tight, stretched, around him and he wonders if it’s that feeling of being filled up that makes her moan so helplessly. The thought is arousing in a way he’s not proud of, base and possessive, and her hot wet cunt feels so mindbendingly good around him, that it takes his mind a moment to realise what they’re doing.

 

“V, wait,” he stills their churning movements with a firm press of his hand on her hip. “Protection, I don’t have anything”

 

“It’s fine,” she answers and presses back against his hand. When he holds her still her impatience rises again. “I’m on the pill and I got tested before leaving Riverdale. It’s fine Jughead”

 

“Right,” he trusts her of course and obviously she trusts he’d be honest if his sexual history extended beyond sharing his virginity with Betty Cooper and a PG-13 make out with Toni. “Ok”

 

He takes the opportunity with their fever tempered slightly to unbutton her top and open it wide so her perfect tits are on display, flawless and tempting in the low light. “Christ you’re beautiful.”

 

Veronica tugs at his sleep shirt and he strips it off one handed and throws it to the floor. “You too Jug, God.” Her eyes roam his body eagerly and a small part of him even might believe her. If a far larger part didn’t know for a fact that he’s nothing to look at compared to her red-haired ex

 

She’s moving beneath him again before his mind can lock its jaws around that self-destructive thought. Grinding against him wantonly and without affectation.

 

He hasn’t imagined sex with Veronica often, up until recently it would never even have occurred to him to imagine it at all, but when he has, he has not imagined her like this.

 

He remembers, at the height of the Black Hood attacks, heading to Archie’s in the hope of building some much needed bridges and coming across Archie and Veronica in his garage. He’d opened the door to the sight of Veronica in her underwear dancing seductively around a barely dressed Archie as he strummed his guitar.

 

That’s how he imagined Veronica, a woman confident in the power of her own beauty, putting on a show. The Veronica beneath him is nothing like that, she’s rough and clumsy as she gropes at his arse to pull him deeper inside. She’s impatient almost to the point of desperation as she thrusts her hips up against his in urgent, unspoken, demand for movement.

 

When he answers her demand and thrusts into her she makes a noise unlike anything he could have imagined. It’s not a girlish whimper of appreciation nor even a husky sexy moan, it’s an ugly breathless grunt forced from her body by the intensity of what she feels in this moment.

 

It’s also the single sexiest thing he’s ever heard. He, Jughead Jones of all the unlikely people, forced that sound from her with a single thrust of his cock and he finds, with her cunt wet and sucking around him and her body trembling with lust, that his mind goes chasing after the sort of thoughts he always considered himself above. The ‘you like that don’t you?’ kind of nacho bullshit he’s always despised and yet, with the heady feeling of being inside her and the sound of her keening in time with the thrust of his hips he can’t help but feel a thrill that, yes, she certainly does like that.

 

She retracts her claws from his arse and clutches at his shoulders, riding out the punishing rhythm he sets. “Fuck” she wails and his ego’s about as ready to explode as his balls are as she throws back her head and chants in time with the rhythm of his hips. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

 

His mind spirals away from him. He can’t hold a single thought steady in his head except perhaps the chant of her name and the thought that it’s never been like this for him. This wild. Physical in a way that leaves no room for reason. He’s groping and kneading at the fullness of her hips and the softness of her breasts and she clinging and gasping and grunting against his neck and the only thought that holds any clarity in his mind finds its way, uninhibited, to his lips. “I want to come inside you.”

 

Her whole body convulses in response and she’s groaning, ‘yes, God, yes’ and grinding herself against him. “Please, Jughead, please, fuck, fill me up.”

 

And he’s gone. Swearing and rutting into her with his hands pinning her fluttering hips and his mouth wet and open against her neck as she keens like an animal and her cunt spasms greedily around him.

 

“Veronica,” her name is a strangled shout, muffled by the wet salt skin of her neck as his eyes roll back and his balls empty into her eager pussy.

 

“Jug,” she replies in kind her body jack-knifing against his as she cums, loud and violent, beneath him.

 

He forces her shoulders back on the couch so that he can draw out the last of their orgasms in deep hard thrusts that draw diminishing grunts of pleasure from her until they’re left still and breathless. Sweat slicked and sticky with each other’s cum.

 

He lies heavily on her, settling his breathing more easily than his foggy post orgasm thoughts, until she gives him a little shove in the chest. “Mind if I take first shower?” she asks with her eyes fixed on her own hand against his shoulder.

 

“Sure,” he croaks and moves out of her way so she can walk naked away from him, her skin already goosebumping in the cold air of their flat.

 

He waits for her to finish with the strong feeling that they need to talk and absolutely no clue what he’ll say, except perhaps that it’s up to her. _Whatever you want._ Yes, he think as the shower shus off and his heart rate picks up, that’s what he’ll say.

 

“All yours,” Veronica says in a neutral voice as she enters the living room barely breaking stride to wave a hand in the direction of the bathroom as she heads to the kitchen for a glass of water.

 

When he emerges just a few minutes later her she’s gone, her bedroom door closed tight against him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that happened. Let me know what you think.


	7. Let's pretend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After dinner he, privately mortified that he’s reduced to this, selects his most figure-hugging Henley and least shapeless pyjama pants and wanders into the living room with his hair finger combed over to one side so that the shaggy black waves flop over one eye. 
> 
> She’s making instant hot chocolate and he leans against the counter, crossing his arms with his hands tucked under his biceps like the contemptible dude-bro he appears to have morphed into overnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am slow and I am sorry. But here is an update finally.

Sleep has always been a fickle mistress for Jughead and that night, when he lays down fully prepared to drown in the tide of speculation and second guesses rising in his mind, she surprises him by drawing him almost immediately into a deep and dreamless slumber.  

 

He’s woken late, as he often is, by the sound of Veronica singing in the shower. He can’t make out the lyrics but the tune is poppy and upbeat so whatever she’s feeling about what they did last night she’s not letting it get her down. 

 

When he emerges, she’s drying her hair upside down in the living room. “In the pot” she calls over the noise of the hair dryer and he makes his way to the kitchen to pour himself a coffee with a disconcerting feeling of normality.  

 

The hair dryer goes silent and he turns to see her arranging the black silk strands in the mirror. Her phone pings and she scans the message quickly as she packs the hair dryer away one handed. “Rob’s got two servers off sick today apparently,” she tells him conversationally. “Looks like I won’t be home for dinner.” 

 

“Right, ok,” he pauses, momentarily at a loss for something to say. “Er, do you want me to leave something for you?” 

 

“Thanks, that’d be great” she smiles, rueful and full of that understated humour of hers. “Even the Rhianna diet doesn’t advocate stale muffins for dinner.” 

 

“Ok,” there’s a brief silence while she organises her school books and he gathers the nerve to speak. “Um, Veronica, about last ni-“ 

 

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she cuts him off, her tone breezy. “Mr heckles stopped by the other day. Apparently, we are finally getting new washing machines and the laundry room will be closed tomorrow.” 

 

“Right,” he mumbles, confused and defeated and, if he’s honest, a little hurt. “Sure.” 

 

_Whatever you want_ , that’s what he’d decided he’d say to her when they talked about the fact they’d fucked on the couch last night. He hadn’t anticipated that what she’d want would be complete denial but obviously that’s how she’s determined to play it. 

 

_Whatever you want,_ he reminds himself as he sits down at the counter and cradles his coffee in both hands, the slight burn against his palms both a distraction and a point of focus. “You should see if you can get Rob to give you an advance,” he suggests, his voice croaky. Perhaps she’ll think it’s just rough from sleep. “Since you’re helping him out.” 

 

She looks satisfied, though he’s unsure if it’s with the suggestion that she approves of or his willingness to play her game of lets-pretend-we-didn’t-have-sex-last-night. 

 

In school she’s her usual dazzling self. When Cassie, observing tradition, lays a hand on his chest in homeroom and flutters her eyelashes as she greets him with her customary “morning gorgeous”, Veronica plays her part by rolling her eyes and stifling a laugh. 

 

Cheerleaders mill around her during break but at lunch she abandons them to take her usual place beside him. Complaining about her morning classes. He does his best to play along. To ignore that she’s ignoring what happened. But the truth is his head’s spinning and his stomach’s churning, and things are not as normal as she wants to pretend because she doesn’t even mention that he’s barely touched his lunch. 

 

“Ronnie,” Brad appears at their table and Jughead pushes away his half-eaten lunch and stands abruptly, feeling Veronica’s eyes on him as he flees the cafeteria. 

 

She must, he thinks as he sits alone on the bleachers firmly mired in self-pity, regret what happened. Maybe she feels guilty because of Brad. Or, maybe - and he once read a study showing that men actually do this - he simply imagined she was enjoying it just because he was having the fuck of his life. 

 

No, even his highly evolved insecurities can’t imagine Veronica Lodge would fake it to save anyone’s ego, least of all his. The noises she’d made. The whimpering, shuddering, pleas for him. The grunts and squeals as he’d ploughed into her and his name,  _his_  name, on her mouth as she’d come apart. She’d definitely enjoyed it. So, it must be Brad he thinks petulantly and kicks at the boards beneath his feet with the toe of his boot. Jealousy slithers in his guts, coiling like a viper in the small of his back, climbing his spine to the bottom of his skull. Whispering possessive poison in his mind. Demanding he make her stop pretending that nothing happened, that Brad is what she wants.  

 

It’s a good job she’s working after school. He’s not convinced he’d be able to stop himself from trying to make her acknowledge what happened. His mantric,  _whatever you want,_ barely enough to keep him from formulating plans to trap her into discussion. 

 

He wants to talk to someone but Missy’s out of town, which, given the volume of Veronica’s cries last night, and the fact Missy thinks they’re siblings is probably a very good thing. Archie’s number still nestles unused in his phone, but he and Archie never really talked about women even when the woman in question wasn’t Veronica. 

 

So, he tries to finish his English essay and, when that fails attempts the chemistry homework that’s he’d usually solicit Veronica’s help for.  She gets home around ten, announcing brightly that Rob has given her an advance and they can turn the heating on again tomorrow. 

 

“Great,” he says as she pulls the portion of lasagne he’s left for her from the oven and settles opposite him at the breakfast bar. “Veronica, we should-“ 

 

“No, we shouldn’t,” she snaps, mask slipping to show something wide eyed and uncertain beneath.  

 

He can’t think of a single thing to say to her then and he must look a thousand shades of pathetic because she takes pity on him and reaches across the chipped countertop to take his hand. “We’re ok Jughead,” she tells him solemnly as if she knows every plunging depth of his fear. “I promise.” 

 

He manages a pained swallow and a stiff nod and she goes back to eating her dinner and talking about work as if everything is normal.  

 

The next day they keep up the charade. “Morning Jughead,” she greets him when he stumbles sleepy eyed and wild haired into the kitchen looking for coffee. 

 

“Jees Veroinca,” he scolds when he finds she’s left her breakfast things strewn all over the counter as usual. “I’ll just clear these up then, shall I?” 

 

She rolls her eyes and wanders off and it’s all normal apart from the fact that when she walks away he has to drag his eyes off her swaying arse because his dick’s threatening to stand to attention at the memory of how good it felt in his hands. 

 

It’s normal except that when the school rumour mill lets him know that Veronica’s declined a second date with Brad he gets an urge, easily resisted, he’s still Jughead after all, to fist pump in celebration. 

 

Normalcy, while elusive for him, as he lies in bed that night focusing so hard on not jerking off over his memories of the night before last that it ends up being all he can think about, seems easy enough for Veronica. Or at least he believes so until the third day after their night together when heavy, sleet-touched, rain means that the entire class, boys and girls alike, are together in the gym for PE, pointlessly running beep tests and doing push-ups in the name of fitness. 

 

He’s just failed to get very far up one of the knotted ropes at the far end of the gym and is sluggishly picking himself up from the crash matt when he catches sight of Veronica watching him out of the corner of his eye. When he looks over, she glances away quickly and normal hastily leaves the room. 

 

After that he’s acutely aware of her gaze. He feels it on him when she thinks he distracted by his lunch and spies her lingering eyes from under his hair as he adds a little extra spice to the chilli that night. After dinner he, privately mortified that he’s reduced to this, selects his most figure-hugging Henley and least shapeless pyjama pants and wanders into the living room with his hair finger combed over to one side so that the shaggy black waves flop over one eye. 

 

She’s making instant hot chocolate and he leans against the counter, crossing his arms with his hands tucked under his biceps like the contemptible dude-bro he appears to have morphed into overnight. Her eyes linger briefly on the shape of his arms before she looks quickly away, clearing her throat and stirring the drinks with more concentration than required. He’s glad then that he’s kept up with the press-ups and sit ups he’d started doing secretly in his room back in the trailer after Betty had first snaked her hand up his shirt and it had become terrifyingly possible that he might have to take his clothes off in front of her at some point. 

 

He reads to her for the first time in several nights, a few chapters of Madame Bovary, and wraps his voice around the words in a way that makes the half-closed lids of her eyes flutter slightly. It a dangerous game he knows that. He’s a novice at these things, clumsy in the art of seduction, and she’s sharp and knowing and Christ he knows he’s not exactly the stuff of fantasy. So, she looks a couple of times, it doesn’t mean she’s going to change her mind about their pact of silence. 

 

A few days later he snags her attention completely by accident. They’re sitting on the couch, her finishing off an English essay with several heavy sighs and him battling his physics homework and wondering if it wouldn’t be better if they just switched and did the homework they don’t suck at. His hand catches, as he runs it in frustration through his hair, on a sticky tangle which he thinks might be a dried blob of pudding that found its way into his fringe as he’d licked out the pot at lunch, and he sets about trying to untangle it.  

 

He’s working his fingers through his hair, his concentration entirely on the task rather than on his homework or the girl at his side as he pulls the matted strands apart and finger combs them out, when he notices her eyes have abandoned the page before her in favour of tracking the motion of his fingers through his uncovered hair.  

 

He stops, hand tangled in his hair, and catches her eyes. Holding her gaze for long heavy moments before she abruptly closes the laptop and stands. “I’m going to finish this in homeroom. Good night Jughead.” 

 

“Night,” he murmurs feeling distinctly like he’s missing an opportunity. 

 

She disappears and he takes a shower because whatever is matted in his hair is not going to be untangled without copious amounts of Veronica’s conditioner. The faintly coconut scented stuff he steals when he knows his generic two-in-one isn’t going to do the trick.  

 

When he exits the bathroom wrapped in a towel, she’s in the lounge, glass of water in hand and a startled expression on her face. She gathers herself quickly, rearranging her expression into impassivity, but she doesn’t leave and she doesn’t draw her gaze away from the still damp lines of his chest while he stands there clutching the towel tightly in one hand and hoping to god the heat of her gaze doesn’t give him a stiffy. 

 

“Night,” he mumbles when she’s stared silently at him for long heart hammering moments and his cock twitches slightly against the damp towel. In bed he tries to shutout the memory of her eyes travelling over his chest and ignore his quickly growing erection. He will not jerk off over her again. Not when she’s so determined to forget their tryst. 

 

So, he stares into the blackness of his windowless room, grips the sheets in both hands and tries to will away the throbbing turgid traitor in his pyjama pants. Sleep eludes him, withholding her peaceful oblivion and leaving him stiff cocked and conflicted between the scratchy sheets of his single bed. 

 

He hears the creak of the living room floor boards followed by the turning of the door knob. For a moment she’s silhouetted, black on grey, against the ambient city light that filters into their flat, then the door closes and he’s left in the dark. With his heart hammering against his ribs and his cock straining even harder against his boxers. 

 

The soft pad of her footfalls and the sound of his own breathing cut into the darkness like a dull blade, leaving ragged tears in their wake. “Is this ok?”  

 

Her voice sooths the air like a balm and he’s already drawing back the cover as he answers, his own voice a scratchy contrast to her full soft tone. “Yeah, God yeah.” 

 

She slips in beside him, her little hands reaching to find him in the blackness, tracing his chest, and, as soon as she gets her bearings, moving lower to find him through his boxers. He feels oddly embarrassed to be discovered like this, painfully hard, alone in the dark. “I was thinking of you” he admits and she whimpers and pushes down his pants, freeing his cock and stroking it eagerly a few times before throwing one leg over his hips. 

 

“I was thinking about you too,” she tells as she settles on him, hot and wet.  

 

“Christ” he hisses at the feel of her and the knowledge that she’s come to him like this, naked form the waist down. The thought of her making the short journey to his door with her pussy bare, wet and ready for him, makes him momentarily mindless and he grinds up against her, his dick pressed between her wet slit and his own stomach. 

 

She already tipping her hips, looking to snag him at her entrance and pull him inside, when his brain kicks back in. “I,” he stills her hips and chokes a little, embarrassed by his own presumption. “I got condoms, if you want.” 

 

“Do you want to use them?” 

 

Not in the slightest. The feeling of the hot slick trap of her pussy against his bare skin was like nothing he’d ever felt before and the chance to revisit that sensation almost overrides the gentleman he tries to be. “It’s up to you,” an evasion, poorly disguised as respect. “Whatever you want.”  

 

She hesitates for barely a second. “I want to feel you,” she decides as she manoeuvres her hips, the head of his cock bumping against her as she fumbles to find him. Frustrated she reaches down between them and guides him inside. 

 

It’s as good as he remembers, wet and warm and griping. “Christ,” he hisses as she starts to move. But for all the feeling of her around him is making his head spin and his hips jerk upwards there’s something about the way she’s rushing this. Like she’s here out of necessity, satisfying something purely carnal, that makes him feel, to coin a phrase, like a piece of meat. 

 

She’s already bouncing enthusiastically on his cock, grunting lightly with each descent. One of her hands braced against his chest, the only point of contact save for the place their bodies join. He could follow her he knows. In minutes this could be over. Days of wondering and watching has them both so primed that he knows she’d be shuddering around him in no time while he pours into her.  

 

He can hear a Reggie Mantle-esque voice in his head telling him to stop being a pussy and just enjoy the eager cunt that’s come to him with no strings attached, but he’s no Reggie and the romantic in him wants more than just humping mindlessly in the dark. 

 

With one swift motion his hands find her sides and he flips her onto her back, pinning her to the mattress with his body and kissing his way from where his mouth lands blindly somewhere just above her breast to the hinge of her jaw. His hands explore her body and the thrusts of his hips are deep and languid as he fondles her breasts and strokes the incredibly tactile curve along the dip of her waist to her full flared hips. 

 

“Christ,” he mumbles, his breath fanning over her ear. “Even in the dark,” he pauses, leaving her hanging and lifts his head a little so his cheek brushes hers and nuzzles his nose against hers, before trailing his closed lips over her other cheek to her opposite ear. “How are you still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen?” 

 

Encouraged by a whispered moan in the air he rubs his cheek tenderly against hers again, trails his lips over her skin until they’re almost, not quite, touching hers, and kisses her just below the corner of her mouth. This time her moan if full bodied and aching.  

 

Her breast is soft and moulds beneath his hands and her pussy is wet and yielding as he rocks inside her with agonising slowness. “God,” he mumbles again as the hand that’s not engaged in delicately teasing her nipple strokes her hair. He lays a trail of tender open-mouthed kisses up the line of her jaw to her ear. “You feel so good Veronica.” 

 

She groans and grips his shoulders, lifting her head into the crook of his neck and away from the gentle caresses of his lips as she starts thrusting up against him. But he won’t be derailed. No kissing she said and ok, fine, those are her rules. But he’ll be damned if he lets her turn this into something meaningless and mechanical. 

 

He steadies her hips firmly with one hand, the other finding its way under her hair to gently ease her face out of its hideaway tucked in his shoulder so he can go back to fucking her slow and gentle while he drops kiss after kiss on her cheeks and throat, punctuated with husky appreciation. “So beautiful,” he tells her, “Amazing,” “God Veronica.” 

 

She says nothing back, but her whimpers grow a little louder a little more desperate. He kisses her closed eye lids and pulls her flush against him as the fuck slowly. “Please,” she begs, voice broken with lust and confliction. “Jug don’t-’ 

 

Her voice fails, crumbling into a sigh, as he trails his fingertips down her cheek. He slows till he’s barely moving at all and lays damp worshipful kisses over her cheek and neck that make her moan. He thinks perhaps as she trembles in his arms that he’s being cruel, that this tenderness is just so much torture for her. That if he cared, if her were merciful, he’d relent and simply give her the meaningless fuck she came to him for. 

 

He’s not merciful, not with her. “Don’t what, Veronica?” he asks, a challenge, a bedroom whisper in her ear.  

 

“Don’t stop,” her defeat shudders through her body as she yields, neck arching for his kisses, legs open wide, spread out to take him soul deep into her cunt. “Please.” 

 

He could be magnanimous in his hollow victory but he’s not, he presses the advantage greedy for more. “I want to see you,” he tells her and reaches for the lamp, bathing the room in the moody flattering glow of the low watt bulb.  

 

His advantage evaporates with the sight of her luminous skin, her tangled hair and pleasure strained features. 

 

“Fuck,” he breathes as he increases the pace of his hips. “God V.” 

 

He hooks his arm under her knee and pulls her leg up high on his body. “Tell me,” he begs, he’s not winning now, he’s falling before her beauty like a stack of cards. “What do you want?” 

 

“Your cum Jughead,” he gets the answer he’d expected. Wanted more than he’d even realised until he heard it on her lips. “Cum in me.” 

 

“Pull it outta me then,” he challenges. He has no idea where this shit is coming from but it’s certainly having the desired effect on Veronica who keens at his word, losing her rhythm slightly. “It’s all for you baby, pull it outta me with that gorgeous pussy.” She doesn’t reply but her body’s response is immediate he feels her tighten around him, every muscle in her body taut with the build of ascent. “That’s it, good girl.” 

 

“Jug,” she’s mindless and monosyllabic, her muscles tensing rhythmically as she repeats his name and the ‘please, please, please’ that’s stuck like a scratched record in her mouth. 

 

“I,” she gasps and her whole body starts to jerk in his arms. “Ahhhh” 

 

“Yes baby, fuck” he encourages as her pussy starts to clench around him. 

 

He bites back the litany of filth throbbing in his mouth. Saves it for another time and contents himself with calling her beautiful and with a final cry of her name as she does as he told her to and milks the cum out of him with the greedy spasms of her pussy. 

 

He’s careful, as he rolls off her, to close the circle of his arms around her shoulders, caging her in his embrace. “You’re amazing,” he whispers into the damp skin below her ear. 

 

“You too,” she replies, humming in agreement as she lets him briefly nuzzle and kiss her throat before she tries to wriggle away.. 

 

“Jughead,” she warns when he tightens the trap of his arms. “Let go. I gotta go back to bed.” 

 

“You could stay,” his voice has a needy pleading lilt he can't muster the will to be ashamed of. 

 

“No,” she tells him firmly, breaking out of his arms but pausing briefly in his bed. “I can’t.” 

 

He reaches for her again as she rolls away, pulling her featherlight body back against his own. For a moment she’s melts into him, then her little hands, that had tugged so insistently at his body moments earlier, are pushing him away. Two hard points of rejection against his bare chest. “Stop Jughead,” she sighs.  

 

“Veronica-” 

 

“Enough,” she snaps and burst from his arms and out of his bed. At the door she pauses and looks at him. He doesn’t even bother to try and hide how confused and forlorn she’s leaving him. “I’m sorry Jughead,” her voice softens. “But this is dangerous for me. Good night.” 


	8. Her rules

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fortunately, while he’s been brooding petulantly over her silence, she’s been formulating actual, coherent, thoughts on the situation. “Part of me thinks that if we had the right set of rules maybe we could, I don’t know, maybe it could work.”
> 
> “Rules?” he asks, caught between the dangling hope of turning two frankly life alter fucks into a permanent arrangement and the sinking certainty that he is not going to like her rules at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been ages. I have been trying truly I have. I kept opening this chapter, then closing it again on a nightly basis having failed to write anything. 
> 
> Anyway i finally ground it out if anyone can still remember whats going on in this story

 

Dangerous for _her_ , Jughead finds himself scoffing internally the next morning when she steps out of her room before seven a.m. already back from a run, showered, dressed, and one slice of toast away from ready for her day.

 

He’d spent the best part of the night mulling over her words. Had thought, with a heavy sleepless weight of guilt, that she’d meant that with him her heart was on the line. That in sharing her body, she was, because of the feelings she once confessed, risking her whole self. Turns out whatever she meant it can’t have been that. The woman before him clearly hasn’t a care in the world.

 

Confusion roots him to the spot for long enough to make her look up from buttering her toast. “If you don’t get in the shower in the next thirty seconds, we’re going to miss the bus.”

 

He grumbles, but obeys anyway. Partly because she’s right and partly because everything he’d planned to say to her today had started with the premise that she was vulnerable.

 

It just so much deja-fucking-vu from there on. Veronica sits beside him on the dirty seat of the bus reading the news on her phone and making the odd observation on the state of the world when it’s the state of their relationship that’s all he can think about. By the time they get home from a long school day of watching her flounce lightly through the halls like nothing unusual or significant happened the night he fears the enamel on his teeth might be cracked form how hard he’s ground them together and his fingers are stiff from the constant clenching of his fists.

 

“Did you finish that history essay for Miss Wallis,” she asks distractedly as she takes off her coat. She’s so unaffected, so cool and calm, so utterly fucking Lodge, that he snaps.

 

“So, we’re playing this game again are we? Great,” he lands his hands on his hips, feeling petulant and mutinous, childish in the face of her composure. “Fucking perfect!”

 

Veronica turns towards him with a raised eyebrow and a haughty questioning look that makes him feel foolish and fuels his anger. “Fine,” he snarls. “Itch scratched right Princess? And now we go back to pretending nothing happened.”

 

The tilt of her head, the steady, scathing, look in her eyes, says _are you finished_ more effectively than her words could and Jughead finds himself clenching his jaw against more recriminations and wishing he’d kept his cool, and his mouth shut.

 

“No actually,” she says eventually, when she’s satisfied her lofty stare has silenced him. “I just figured the halls of the school where we’re supposed to be siblings might not be the best place to discuss the rigorous fucking you gave me last night. Veronica Lodge doesn’t fear infamy, but I’m not sure I want to be known as the Cersei Lannister of Whitman High”

 

He can’t help but laugh a little at that, the irritating, wonderful, Veronica-ness of it. “Right,” he smirks slightly, brokering a truce she accepts with an answering quirk of her eyebrow. “I mean, you’re obviously Daenerys”

 

“Obviously,” she nods, looking satisfied and amused before her expression turns serious, the hint of a frown between her eyebrows. “It’s clear ignoring what happened would be an exercise in futility, not to mention a crime against great sex,” she pauses. “I’m just struggling to work out what the hell we do about it.”

 

He doesn’t have a response. He hadn’t really considered what he wanted to do about their tryst beyond wanting her to acknowledge that it happened at all.

 

“There’s a lot at stake Jughead,” she says eventually, her voice soft and laced with uncertainty.

 

“Yeah,” is all he can manage and it's cracked and half lost in a nervous swallow.

 

Fortunately, while he’s been brooding petulantly over her silence, she’s been formulating actual, coherent, thoughts on the situation. “Part of me thinks that if we had the right set of rules maybe we could, I don’t know, maybe it could work.”

 

“Rules?” he asks, caught between the dangling hope of turning two frankly life alter fucks into a permanent arrangement and the sinking certainty that he is not going to like her rules at all.

 

She reels them off with quickfire efficiency. They all amount to the same thing, they tell no one, they don’t get jealous, possessive, or in any way attached. “We’re both free agents,” she says and he grinds his teeth, knowing where this is going. “We can date other people, naturally”

 

His eyes narrow and he’s about to offer a scathing rejoiner but she just keeps talking like she hasn’t noticed he’s glaring mutinously at her.

 

“We should keep anything physical to the flat, preferably after dark. That way nothing changes in our daily lives,” she tells him and he frowns even harder. “Either one of us can pull the plug at anytime. One of us says it’s over and it’s over, ok? No explanation needed, no guilt trips.”

 

“Right,” he mutters. Her rules make his body burn with resentment. “Got your escape strategy lined up, at the off. That’s very tactical Lodge, daddy’d be proud”

 

Her cat like eyes narrow at that and her mouth forms a hard, unforgiving line. “Seriously?”

 

“I get it, you want to be able to get out unscathed, when one of those dates you'r planning to go on finally delivers you your prince charming.”

 

“Fuck you Jughead,” she seethes. “You think these rules are about some hypothetical future hunk?”

 

His jaw clenches. The conversation is spinning away from him, because yes that’s exactly what we thought and the bite and snarl of her sudden anger tells him that he’s way off base.

 

“If this goes bad,” Veronica continues, all hard edges and sharp corners as she gestures emphatically around their flat. “If we fuck up what we have here, you can go home. Your dad, your gang, even Betty and Archie, they’d all welcome you back with open arms. Me,” she shakes her head, fury crumbling into something stumbling and fearful. “I sided with my father’s enemy. He’s not a forgiving man, nor a merciful one. I can never go back Jughead, ever. If I gamble here and lose. If you take your half of the rent and prance off home, I’m screwed. I’d have nothing. No home, no friends, nothing”

 

“Veronica-”

 

“So, sue me,” she cuts him off. “For trying to mitigate some risk here. Because I’m the one taking them all Jughead. I mean, what do you actually have to lose?”

 

“You,” the answer comes, honest and raw and unthinking. “You Veronica, I could lose you, and you’re my best friend.”

 

Her breath shudders and sighs in her chest. “Then we definitely shouldn’t do this,” she squeezes her forehead with a delicate finger and thumb. “Just forget it, ok? It was a bad idea”

 

“Veronica,” he catches her arm as she turns away. “I can follow your rules. I can. Whatever you want, I can do it.” He knows he must look pretty pathetic, all but pleading with her not to withdraw the offer but he doesn’t care. The thought of never touching her again is one his brain immediately brands unacceptable. “I want you,” he admits, hoping honesty will sway her. “I just, want you.”

 

Her body eddies on the spot, a physical embodiment of the indecision he can see on her face. He steps closer and lays his hands on her body, one on the bare skin where her neck slopes elegantly into her shoulder and one slipping under the hem of her blouse. And yes, he does know that it’s cheating. “Please Veronica.”

 

“Jughead, don’t,” she tilts her chin, so she can meet his eyes, her gaze a hair of softness off defiant.

 

But she doesn’t pull away and he closes the net. His hand slips further up her blouse and he dips his head to kiss her neck briefly. “I won’t abandon you,” he pledges against her ear. “Whatever happens, we’ll make it work here. I promise.”

 

She pushes away from him and gives him a hard, assessing look. “Fine,” she says and takes two steps away towards her room. “One more rule,” she stops at the door, turning to point a commanding finger at him. “My foot rubs are scared, don’t even think about sexualising them.”

 

“Noted,” he nods and watches her disappear feeling bewildered and excited, a little guilty, and a hell of a lot terrified.

 

He makes dinner and they sit at the counter, because its tacos and they’ll end up everywhere if they eat on the couch. She dumps extra spicy sauce on hers, despite that he’d already added enough chilli to make his own eyes water in an attempt to finally make a meal that’s hot enough for her tastes, and tells him about the C- she got on her book report. “Mr McFae hates me, I swear.”

 

“Or maybe you did it while watching Bachelor Island and didn’t pay enough attention,” he counters, licking sauce from his fingers.

 

She gives him a sour look. “You know very well it’s Love Island, stop dissimulating. Besides everyone know reality TV requires less than five percent of a person’s concentration. The report was fine. McFae is just a mean old man who hates cheerleaders on principal.”

 

“I like McFae,” he defends the teacher who’s never given him less than and A- and whose observations have always struck Jughead as profound and insightful.

 

Veronica rolls her eyes in response. “Of course you do, he’s basically you forty years from now.”

 

“Wow, thanks V,” he grumbles as he cleans up around her, they really need to have a talk about proper division of labour. “I didn’t know you had such high hopes for my future.”

 

She shrugs unrepentantly and wanders off to lounge on the couch, browsing Amazon and singing a sultry jazz song too softly for him to make out the words. When he joins her, she places her feet in his lap and he works the fatigue out of her soles as they complain about how hard it is to find anything compared to Netflix.

 

She declares herself tired just before 11pm and he’d usually stay up a while but he’s not sure how their new arrangement is going to pan out and he doesn’t want to miss the chance of her coming to him again. Especially as he’s already broken her final rule and spent the entire time he was massaging her feet nursing a semi and battling the desire to run his hands up her legs.

 

He goes to bed, hoping she’ll slip into his room. By midnight he gives up and finally falls asleep. It’s dark and his body clock has no clue at all what time it is when he’s woken by the feel of his mattress dipping under her weight.

 

“V?” he contemplates reaching for his phone or asking her the time, but then she finds the bedside light switch and he decided he truly doesn’t give a fuck.

 

“Jesus,” he chokes out at the sight of her wearing a black lace teddy with more strategic cut outs than actual fabric and throwing one smooth bare leg over him so she’s straddling him. “Christ V, give a guy a heads up if you’re gonna look like this.”

 

“Oh, this old thing,” she jokes, obviously amused at having turned the ever aloof Jughead Jones into a drooling idiot. “You like?”

 

“Fuck yes,” he grabs her waist enjoying the way the lace feels half covering her skin and her gasp of surprise when he pulls her hard against his instant erection.

 

She’s already wet, he can feel it through his boxers, and he wonders if she got turned on picking this out for him, anticipating the effect it would have on him. “Leave it on,” he orders when her fingers slip under the straps. “I wanna fuck you in it.”

 

She moans in response and slides her fingers down between their bodies to free him from his boxers and guide him between her legs, awkwardly adjusting the scrap of fabric covering her pussy so she can get him lined up with her entrance and skink down onto him.

 

“Fuck,” he hisses in appreciation, eyes and hands greedy and grasping on her lace covered flesh. “Christ V, you’re so beautiful”

 

She bites her lip, clearly pleased with the effect her efforts have had on him, and leans back a little, bracing her hands on his thighs as she moves above him. The action arches her back and her breasts press against the lace, nipples dark and tempting, visible through the lace, and his head spins.

 

When she starts talking he almost cums right there. Her words aren’t even that filthy, but she’s telling him what any man being fucked by a goddess like her would want to hear. That he feels good, that his cock fills her up and that she, this part breathy and gasping, loves to take it all.

 

“Jesus, V,” he stills her movements, hands clamped down on her thighs with bruising force. “Don’t say shit like that or this’ll be over real quick.”

 

That admission makes her moan and press back against his hands, a faster pace than before, urgent and grunting with every thrust. Oh, she likes that, he realises. Likes to have him at her mercy, falling apart at her whim. Fine, that not exactly hard for him.

 

“God, V,” he groans. “You’re too much, too fucking gorgeous. Slow down baby.”

 

She doesn’t, not that he’d thought she would, this is clearly doing it for her. “You’ll make me cum babe, your pussy’s too fucking good. Too perfect,” he answers her thrusts with a jerk of his own hips. “So, fucking wet for me.”

 

She whimpers and rides him harder. “For you Jughead”

 

“Fuck yes it’s for me,” he snarls losing himself in this power play. If he’s going down, he’s taking her with him. “All dressed up just for me. Wet and eager for my cock. Good girl, you fucking love it, don’t you?”

 

“Yes,” she gasps and tips forward hands clawing at his chest, adjusting the angle so he feels himself hitting something inside her that makes her moan.

 

“You love fucking away on my cock?” his voice is low, almost drowned out by her moans. “Taking it all in that glorious cunt?”

 

“Yes. God, oh, fuck”

 

“That’s it. Good girl, cum all over me,” she’s so close, frantically bouncing on him, her body drawn taut as a bow, all he needs to do is let her loose. He grabs roughly at her arse and helps her go even faster. They’re both grunting and panting and it’s probably ugly as fuck the way they’re rutting away, their faces pulled into grimaces of pleasure, their rhythm lost to desperate need. He doesn’t give a shit.

 

“God, V, fuck, I’m gonna-“ there’s no holding back now, he just hopes she’s with him as he shatters.

 

She’s right there, squealing in time with his low grunts as they hit the high together so perfectly synchronised that his hazy, orgasm fogged, mind momentarily wonders if they weren’t made for each other after all.

 

She collapses on his chest, sweaty and panting. If her head’s spinning and her ears are ringing like his are, she’ll definitely need a minute before she makes her escape. He takes the opportunity to gently stroke the clammy skin of her back, cradling, but not trapping her in his arms.

 

After a few minutes with nothing but the stick of her wet skin against his and the sound of their breathing evening out, she lays a kiss, the first one she’s given him, on the hinge of his jaw before pushing off him and leaving without a word.

 

His damp skin feels cold and shivery in the chill air of the flat where her body had lain, but the spot where she’d kissed him feels warm and for now that will have to be enough.

 

Morning brings groggy grunts of greeting, coffee and normality. The evening finds him sitting on Missy’s couch in the hour between when his shift at the comic book store ends and Veronica comes home. They’re drinking cheap instant cocoa while he gives her the edits he’s made on her essay.

 

“Thank you,” she says smiling at him over her mug. “Knowing the material doesn’t seem enough for Professor Norton, it’s gotta read like I’m an English major,” her smile dances to her eyes, warm and deep brown like the drink in his hands. “Fortunately, one moved in next door.”

 

He returns her smile, half bashful at the praise, half guilty at the way he continues to let her believe that _School_ for him is college and that ‘ _I always wanted to major in English’_ isn’t still a couple of years away. “At your service, it’s not like I sleep much anyway.”

 

Her smile turns sly. “Veronica not letting you get your rest, huh?”

 

His insides clench and swirl with the fear of discovery. He knew the walls were thin but with both their lounge and Missy’s separating his bedroom from hers he hadn’t thought she’d hear anything, _Fuck,_ if their neighbour thinks he’s getting duelling banjos close with his sister things could get difficult.

 

But Missy’s expression is teasing not disgusted. “You’re face. If my brother was that loud, urgh,” she shudders dramatically.

 

He forces a playful grimace. “That’s what noise cancelling headphones and unwavering denial are for. I hear nothing, ergo there’s nothing to hear”

 

Missy grins and pats his arm. “Of course not.”

 

Later Veronica tastes his most recent attempt at making the pozole her abuela used to cook for her and declares it not ‘cosy’ enough. Frustrated, this is his fourth attempt and her feedback is characteristically unhelpful, he crosses his arms and gives her a damning look. “Great” he grumbles. “I’ll make sure to pick up and extra sachet of ‘cosy’ at the store next week”

 

Veronica unfazed, as always, by his sulking adds a little chilli oil and they eat in silence while he mentally decides how to tweak the recipe before he tries it again.

 

When she goes to bed, she runs her hand over his shoulders as she passes the back of the sofa. “Don’t stay up too late,” she tells him in a voice that’s more promise than command, her fingers scribing invitation briefly on the nape of his neck before she vanishes.

 

Naturally, he goes straight to bed. She comes to him within minutes, stripping off at his bedside her eyes on his face as she peels away her underwear to expose the pure perfection of her body.

 

He presses her into the mattress and kisses her neck and breasts as he fucks her, until the volume of her squeals starts to rise and he lifts his head and presses his hand over her mouth to silence her.

 

Her eyes widen, affronted, and she makes a noise of protest against his palm.

 

“Quiet” he orders as he snaps his hips against hers, hitting her just how he’s learned she likes it and she gives him one last furious glare before her eyes roll back as she surrenders to ecstasy. He feels like a fucking god as he comes inside her trembling, defeated, body.

 

“Missy heard you last night,” he explains as he releases her and lays conciliatory kisses on shoulder.

 

Briefly her face tightens before she laughs lightly. “Ah well you could have just said so instead of going full caveman on me”

 

“Hmm,” he hums against her breast before looking up at her through his lashes. “I think you liked it.” another kiss on her soft heaving breast and a teasing smile. “And you a feminist.”

 

She shoves him hard in the chest but clasps her hands around his neck immediately as he moves away and pulls him back to her. “Maybe,” she whispers coquettishly and the image of the other ways she might like him to take charge makes him groan.

 

“Now that is something that definitely requires further investigation,” he tells her against the soft scented skin of her cleavage.

 

“Definitely,” she agrees, momentarily girlish and yielding in his arms before she gives him a push and crawls out from under his body. “But not tonight.”

 

She’s gone, leaving his hand reaching into empty air for her and his cock, which had just begun to rise again in anticipation, softening dejectedly against his leg.

 

There are rules she seems willing to break over the next few weeks. It’s not many days before her ‘after dark’ rule flies out of the window. On a Saturday morning when they both have a few hours before work he unthinkingly lays a hand on her waist as he reaches over her to grab a cup and they end up fucking on the kitchen counter. She doesn’t have much problem with her foot rubs turning into foreplay either, not if the way she bites her lip and parts her knees is a reliable indication.

 

When the watching students, not to mention their fathers, ogle her at a Friday night game. It’s him that finds her during the second quarter, but it’s her who drags him into a cubicle in the girls’ locker room. “You’re not jealous of a few stares, are you?” she’d asked almost accusingly even as she’d slipped a hand into the back pocket of his jeans to pull him in close.

 

“That would be against the rules,” he tells her as he leans in to tease the lobe of her ear with his teeth. “Not to mention hypocritical. All I see is you.”

 

She’d spun around in the confined space and placed her palms against the wall so he could flip her flared little skirt up onto her back and pull down her booty shorts. He’d fucked her, quick and quiet, one hand on her clit and the other over her mouth, whispering filth in her ear, as he’d promised to send her back out there with his cum soaking through her shorts for all her admirers to see. He’d had her teeth marks in his palm for hours after.

 

The rules she upholds he tells himself don’t matter. Despite that his jaw aches with the desire to kiss her. Not just during the euphoric crescendo of sex, but in the moments around the flat when she strikes him as beautiful, or brilliant, or infuriating and he wishes it was his right to simply lean across and connect with her.

 

It’s not important that she still refuses to sleep in his bed after she’s come to him. It doesn’t matter that every night its harder and harder not to cling to her in the aftermath and beg her to fall asleep beside him. How could any of that matter when in the morning she’s there, sipping from a coffee mug he knows she’ll leave on the counter for him to clear away and greeting him with a warm easy smile like he has every right to be in her life.

 

Isn’t he after all getting the best of all worlds? She’s still right there, laughing at him for his pretention and managing his meagre funds. She still choses his company at school and forces him to watch facile reality TV in the evening. If he’s lost nothing of the friendship, they’ve been building in New York then what could he possibly resent? If he loses nothing and gets to fuck her then, surely, he’s winning here.

 

On a Thursday night, when they’re both exhausted from juggling work and school, she falls asleep on the sofa beside him as he reads to her. If he slowly, carefully so as not to wake her, tucks her sleeping form against his side and cradles her body in his arms, then that’s just a symptom of too long without the physical closeness he was used to sharing with Betty.

 

He’s been thinking of Betty recently more than he has since he first fled Riverdale. It’s impossible not to, now that he’s sleeping with Veronica, simply because the experience is so strikingly different. Everything with Betty was weighted. Whether they were making gentle whispered love or dabbling with the hint of a dominatrix beneath her black wig, Betty brought a heavy, controlled, intensity to their bed.

 

Veronica, for all her worldliness, approaches sex with a refreshing abandon. She’s all passion and instinct where Betty was always deep emotion and control. He’s different with Veronica too, urgent and greedy in a way he’d never imagined himself being.

 

He imagines doing things with Veronica he never thought of with Betty. His fantasies aren’t terribly kinky, but they are wholly sexual in a way he’d never considered himself to be. Perhaps it’s because with Betty every thought and action strained beneath the burden of their love, or perhaps, more simply, it’s just impossible to fantasise about jerking off all over a face you remember sporting pigtails and braces.

 

Either way, he thinks of Betty which leads, inevitably, to missing Betty. He misses her swift, agile mind and the sweetness she managed to hold on to despite the persistent lap of the dark tide within her. Missing Betty triggers, again inevitably, missing Archie and the simple pleasures of friendship that they’d begun to share again over the summer. He misses video games and pizza. Gentle teasing and late-night conversations.

 

Most of all he misses how it was always the four of them at Pop’s, him and Veronica bickering and competitive, each with their lover, long suffering and indulgent, at their side trying to keep the peace.

 

Strange, he thinks, how he misses them more now that he needs them less. Now that New York feels less like and escape and more like a home. Veronica laughs at the comedy he’s tuned out in favour of contemplating his life. She misses them too, he knows that, and it’s a knowledge that pulses with regret in his mind. Could he do it? Reach out, back across the months and miles, and call them friends again despite his broken heart? Veronica laughs again. For her, he thinks, perhaps he could.

 

After all, trying to make Veronica happy is the very least he owes her. So, he thinks about Betty and Archie, about Riverdale and making peace. He thinks about the lengths he’d go to secure Veronica’s happiness.

 

It’s ironic - and he has come to despise irony, he no longer sees any humour or cleverness in it - that this thought process is the reason he hurts her once again. Because Betty had been on his mind as Veronica started talking about the Winter Formal and school dances are a subject he’s long since learned to tune out.

 

“What do you say?” Veronica’s pressing for an answer to a question he didn’t catch her asking. “The Jones siblings’ New York social debut”

 

“A dance V,” he gives her a look he hopes tells her exactly how not going to happen that is. “Seriously?”

 

“Well,” she wheedles and he realises he’s got a battle ahead of him. “I did see a half decent suit in the window of a thrift store near work and I still have a glorious silk Valentino that will definitely turn a few heads. Come on Jug, you might even have fun.”

 

“Veronica, have you met me?” he lifts an eyebrow. “Dances are really not my thing.”

 

“Nonsense,” she dismisses, smirking slightly. “I have personally witnessed you donning a suit and attending at least one high school dance”

 

He scoffs and the words come out without any discernible input from his brain. “Yeah, with Betty.”

 

Her expression flickers, hurt dancing across her eyes long enough to smote his heart with regret, but too swiftly for him to formulate an apology before she’s changing the subject with a brusque. “Suit yourself”

 

_Shit,_ he thinks as he watches in paralysed silence as she gathers her things and leaves for work. _Well done, Jughead. Stupendous work on making her happy. Fuck._


	9. Going down hard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the lounge he watches her emerge from her room with a glower. In his mind the last of his good sense, the part telling him to mind his own god damn business, is going down hard in the battle with jealous jerk Jughead who’s demanding to know why a platonic night out requires anything that sexy beneath her clothes.
> 
>  
> 
> None of his business. She’s not his girlfriend, he never wanted that, never offered that, he has zero right to question her lingerie choices. Jealous jerk Jughead doesn’t really care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is so short. But the natural break fell at 2.5k words so I just cut it off there.

Veronica doesn’t come to him that night. Not that he’d expected her to. Not when round and round in his head, stuck like the most insidious advertising jingle, all he can hear is his own scathing voice. _Yeah, with Betty._

He can’t latch his mind onto formulating a proper apology. He feels like he had the previous week as he’d struggled to finish his physics homework. Like the more he tries to focus, to coerce his brain into concentration, the more it slips away from him. The solution turning blurred and fuzzy in the far distance.

 

Veronica had perched beside him then, closet scientist that she is, and worked through the problem with him. Guiding him, step by stumbling step to the answers. She won’t be helping him with this.

 

Recently he’d begun to believe that he’d figured Veronica out. The way she’d reacted to everything that’s happened between them, good and bad, had after all been remarkably consistent. Normalcy had been her go to and he’d cursed it at the time, wished then, without the punch in the gut of hindsight, that she’d show any kind of emotion. Any tiny crack in that outward okay-ness.

 

In the days following his slip he wishes she’d retreat again behind that inscrutable mask of _fine._

This next morning she emerges with tired eyes and shoots him a look of chilling indifference before grabbing her coffee and returning to her room. She slips out while he’s in the shower and he has to ride the bus to school alone for the first time since their arrival in New York.

 

He hasn’t formulated an apology by the time school lets out, despite spending his lunch break hiding in the library and thinking of nothing else. He has no idea how to tell her that he didn’t mean what she thinks he meant - that Betty stands apart, a higher power of his universe, whose influence Veronica could never hope to wield. She’d only ask him what he did mean and he can’t find a real answer for that other than a shrug and a repetition, like taking up a shovel from his place in a deep fucking hole, _it’s Betty._

He gropes for the words to tell Veronica that Betty always just _was._ Since childhood Betty would chivvy and cajole him into all sorts of activities his early onset misanthropy had resisted. The red and gold double act of his best friends pulling him into their games, dragging him to their parties, including him in their endless group chats with Kevin or Ethel which he’d routinely silence the first time one of them ‘changed the name of this group’ because really, why the fuck?

 

But he can’t turn all that history into words and the longer he goes without apologising the harder it gets. Veronica is as cool and fragile as the ice that forms on the inside of his bedroom window, beautiful delicate crystals holding together only so long as they’re left undisturbed.

 

They fall into an awkward silence over the next few days, too late now, he feels, to say he’s sorry, too dangerous to say anything to anger her. The fear of losing her entirely ties knots around his tongue every time he gathers the courage to speak. So, they say little beyond the necessary exchanges of cohabitation. Yes _,_ sure he’ll pick up laundry detergent, does she need anything else? No thank you, she’s fine.

 

She’s not fine, he’s not fine, nothing is fucking fine. But, he knows because abandonment has shadowed him his entire life, things could absolutely be worse.

 

By the end of the week things feel less strained. She hasn’t come to his bed or so much as laid her tired feet in his lap, but she has eaten the meals he’s placed wordlessly before her and thanked him stiffly before putting her plate in the sink. Progress, he supposes.

 

On Friday morning she waits long enough that they travel together on the bus to school. It feels like an olive branch. He grasps it gratefully and, when they’re met by posters for the dance all over the corridors and the sight of a couple of seniors selling dance tickets, offers one in return. “We could go if you want,” he gestures to the makeshift ticket booth and swallows down the lump in his throat that tastes like fear of rejection.

 

“Thanks,” she replies stiffly. “But I’m already going with Brad. Platonically.”

 

“Right,” he keeps his voice level, ignoring the only clear thought in his mind, _seriously, fucking Brad?_

 

After a pause that stretches into awkwardness he nods briskly. “Cool, great, you deserve a nice night.”

 

He flees without waiting for a response and tries not to spiral. Platonically, she said and he knows her well enough to know she’d be straight about something like that. So, it’s fine, perfect even. He doesn’t have to go, but she gets to have a nice time. Perfect.

 

He’s determined to say nothing about her not date with Brad. Just like he won’t mention that she’s called off their arrangement without a word, or that he misses the feel of her body more than he can possibly express. She doesn’t need his bullshit after all and he’s a master of repressing his emotions.

 

Perhaps, like a boiler without a valve, it’s that repression that’s his undoing. Perhaps if he’d said something, anything at all to relieve the pressure, things wouldn’t have erupted so spectacularly on the night of the dance.

 

He’s doing ok when he hears her on the phone to Brad in the early evening finalising the plan, if his eves dropping is correct, for him to collect her from the flat later. He barely clenches his jaw at the clinging silk of her dress or the incomprehensible amount of time it takes her to do her make up.

 

She’d said it was platonic. And hey, if it weren’t it wouldn’t be any of his business. Veronica can date whoever she wants. It’s fine, he’s fine.

 

In the trash in the bathroom, when she finally vacates it and he can take a piss, there’s discarded packaging depicting a slender leg sporting a lace topped stocking, the kind that don’t require a garter belt. New stockings. New, lace topped stockings. Not tights he thinks sourly, but stockings, bought specifically for tonight.

 

In the lounge he watches her emerge from her room with a glower. In his mind the last of his good sense, the part telling him to mind his own god damn business, is going down hard in the battle with jealous jerk Jughead who’s demanding to know why a platonic night out requires anything that sexy beneath her clothes.

 

None of his business. She’s not his girlfriend, he never wanted that, never offered that, he has zero right to question her lingerie choices. Jealous jerk Jughead doesn’t really care.

 

He steps up behind her while she adjusts her pearl stud earrings in the mirror in the lounge. “You look,” he pauses and lays his hands on the sideboard, one either side of her hips, caging her. “So beautiful.”

 

He expression flickers. Kalidoscoping through a tumbling rainbow of emotions before she settles on polite indifference. “Thanks”

 

Too late, he thinks, feeling disturbingly predatory. I see you, Veronica.

 

He draws a little closer, almost but not quite touching her and her breath quakes. I see you.

 

“I hope Stars and Stripes will appreciate the effort,” his voice is husky and challenging, right in her ear.

 

She avoids his gaze and fixes her hair, almost resolute, almost hidden. “I’m sure he will, although I assure you Veronica Lodge dresses always for herself.”

 

He lets out a shuddering breath as he tries to shackle the madman’s voice inside his head telling him to stop her leaving, because if she leaves who knows if she’ll come back to him. But he’s losing control of himself, fear driving him, no brakes, towards self-destruction.  “Really?” He hisses the accusation in her ear and his hand finds the hem of her dress dragging it up her thigh till the tops of those barely black stockings are under his palm.

 

They’re frozen for a moment, eyes locked in the mirror, his hand against her hot thigh. “None of your business,” she spits, brushing his hand away and returning her attention to the mirror.

 

Sane Jughead is screaming at him to leave it alone and hope she’ll roll this transgression up with all the others and let time ease her into forgiveness. But there’s a larger part, jealous and possessive, caveman Jughead she’d call him, that’s lost all sight of reason.

 

One step closer and his front presses lightly against her back as he dips his head and kisses her neck. “Is he really what you want Veronica?” he murmurs, switching from accusation to seduction. There’s been no denying from the first time together that he wields a certain power over her body. He’d never imagined himself to be the kind of person to use that power over someone else, but he seems to barely know himself tonight.

 

His hand’s back under her dress snapping the elastic of her stocking. “Did you put these on for him?” his free hand, the one not intruding under her dress lightly grips her throat in the way he’s learned she likes, firm but not choking, and he pushes up her chin so he can hold her eyes in the mirror. “Did you try to convince yourself he’s what you want?”

 

“Jughead,” there’s rebuke in her voice but its indistinct and her head tips to grant his mouth access to her throat.

 

“He’s not V,” he mumbles between kisses, feeling his control slipping further away into something desperate and clinging. If he can just remind her how good they are together, how hot their fire burns, then she’ll stay. Maybe she’ll stay with him.  “He’s not the one who makes you feel like this.”

 

His hand travels inwards over the front of her thigh, pulling her closer, so his erection presses into her butt as his hand delves between her legs. They part slightly in invitation even as her voice struggles to be firm. “Jughead-“

 

“If he’s the one,” he interrupts as her legs open wider so he can reach fully between them and rub her through her wet panties. “If you think you can want him like you want me then tell me to stop,” he runs his tongue up the side of her neck so he can suck her ear lobe and whisper in her ear. “Tell me to stop.”

 

“Don’t,” she makes a noise that must be a sigh but shudders through her like a sob. “Don’t stop,” and everything spikes inside him like someone just turned up the volts. In a move fast enough to make her squeak he spins her away from the sideboard and uses the hand on her neck to fold her over the back of the couch. “Good girl,” he mutters gruffly, flipping up her skirt and dropping to his knees so he’s eye level with her lace covered pussy and stockinged thighs.

 

“Fuck,” he swears before he brings his mouth down to suck and kiss her through her panties. Before pushing the scrap of fabric aside and diving back in with long sweeps of his tongue from her clit to her arsehole. She hisses in surprise and pleasure when he tongues at that sensitive entrance and moans, deep and broken, when he drops lower to suck and lap at her clit.

 

“Christ,” she curses. She sounds furious and profoundly aroused. He’s ashamed to admit it’s the sexiest thing he’s ever heard.

 

“Shush baby,” he pushes his fingers inside her pussy. “I’ve got you.”

 

Her groan sounds like falling, like going under. He sucks her clit, his nose virtually up her pussy, like he could suffocate in her cunt. The thought makes his straining erection push ever more painfully against his jeans. He doesn’t care. He loves the feel of being trapped in his clothes while she’s bent over and bare for him. She’s whimpering and trembling and as he sucks her clit, almost sobbing out with need. He could weep himself for the perfect flavour of her pussy and the sour tang of her resentment in the air.

 

I’m sorry he thinks even as he switches it up again. Two fingers pumping into her pussy, his thumb working her clit and his tongue teasing the sensitive skin between her holes, venturing up now and then to swirl around her arse. Christ, he thinks as she whimpers in response, he really wants to fuck her that way.

 

“God, yes, please,” she’s begging, teetering on the edge and he wants to taste her when she cums so he tongue fucks her pussy and rubs her clit, drinking in the rush of wetness and her cries of pleasure.

 

He’s on his feet as soon as she starts to come down. He knows her body. He knows how she can push through the hypersensitivity and cum again in quick succession. He pulls her panties back into place and, blame it on his jealousy and the lust addling his mind, starts rubbing her through the fabric and pouring out possessive bullshit in her ear.

 

“Don’t change these,” he growls as he works her through the lace. “Wear them while you get in his car and sit next to him. Feel them while you dance with him and remember who makes you feel like this, remember who gets you this wet”

 

She grunts indignantly and pushes back fleetingly at the hand he’s placed between her shoulder blades to keep her pinned to the couch. But she’s a greedy thing his Veronica, insatiable in all the finest ways and she’s close. Despite, or maybe because, of his words she’s ready to come apart for him again.

 

“Who Veronica?” he snarls. “Who makes you feel like this?”

 

“Christ, fuck,” she’s on the edge, quaking on the precipice of pleasure, so, so ready to beg for him and yet he feels like the weak one. Like the one who has everything to lose and no way to hold on. Part of him wants to turn her around so he can curl into her arms, cry into her skin and let her comfort him. But she’s Veronica Lodge, how can he possibly show her that much weakness?

 

“Who, Veronica?” he barks instead, curling his fingers for emphasis.

 

“You, god Jughead, you. Don’t stop, fuck, I’m-“ she trails off into guttural mewls as her legs quake as she cums. For the briefest moment he feels victorious, vindicate maybe, in a point well made. Then her body goes limp and the energy in the room sloughs away leaving him staggering back fumbling for words. To explain, to apologise, to beg forgiveness yet again.

 

She’s straightens slowly and without releasing him from the steel trap of her gaze pointedly slips her panties off from under her dress and leaves them discarded on the living room floor as she walks to her room. Moments later she returns with her head held high and her gaze never touching his, where he stands dumbly where she left him frozen by the sideboard.

 

Just then the intercom buzzes and she grabs her bag and starts to head out. At the door she finally faces him, levelling him with the coldest eyes he’s ever seen. “Dick move Jughead.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As always feedback in manna from heaven. Let me know what you think. I have 6 chapters drafte out so hopefull will be regular with updates


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